Python and ElementTree: return "inner XML" excluding parent element

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In Python 2.6 using ElementTree, what's a good way to fetch the XML (as a string) inside a particular element, like what you can do in HTML and javascript with innerHTML?

Here's a simplified sample of the XML node I am starting with:

<label attr="foo" attr2="bar">This is some text <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a> in embedded HTML</label>

I'd like to end up with this string: 

This is some text <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a> in embedded HTML

I've tried iterating over the parent node and concatenating the tostring() of the children, but that gave me only the subnodes:

# returns only subnodes (e.g. <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a>)
''.join([et.tostring(sub, encoding="utf-8") for sub in node])

I can hack up a solution using regular expressions, but was hoping there'd be something less hacky than this:

re.sub("</\w+?>\s*?$", "", re.sub("^\s*?<\w*?>", "", et.tostring(node, encoding="utf-8")))
elementtree xml python
3 Answers

This is based on the other solutions, but the other solutions did not work in my case (resulted in exceptions) and this one worked:

from xml.etree import Element, ElementTree

def inner_xml(element: Element):
    return (element.text or '') + ''.join(ElementTree.tostring(e, 'unicode') for e in element)

Use it the same way as in Mark Tolonen's answer.

user_17433670
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