Removing an element, but not the text after it

Question

I have an XML file similar to this:

<root>
<a>Some <b>bad</b> text <i>that</i> I <u>do <i>not</i></u> want to keep.</a>
</root>

I want to remove all text in <b> or <u> elements (and descendants), and print the rest. This is what I tried:

from __future__ import print_function
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('a.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

parent_map = {c:p for p in root.iter() for c in p}

for item in root.findall('.//b'):
  parent_map[item].remove(item)
for item in root.findall('.//u'):
  parent_map[item].remove(item)
print(''.join(root.itertext()).strip())

(I used the recipe in this answer to build the parent_map). The problem, of course, is that with remove(item) I'm also removing the text after the element, and the result is:

Some that I

whereas what I want is:

Some  text that I  want to keep.

Is there any solution?

Answer 1

If you won't end up using anything better, you can use clear() instead of remove() keeping the tail of the element:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET


data = """<root>
<a>Some <b>bad</b> text <i>that</i> I <u>do <i>not</i></u> want to keep.</a>
</root>"""

tree = ET.fromstring(data)
a = tree.find('a')
for element in a:
    if element.tag in ('b', 'u'):
        tail = element.tail
        element.clear()
        element.tail = tail

print ET.tostring(tree)

prints (see empty b and u tags):

<root>
<a>Some <b /> text <i>that</i> I <u /> want to keep.</a>
</root>

Also, here's a solution using xml.dom.minodom:

import xml.dom.minidom

data = """<root>
<a>Some <b>bad</b> text <i>that</i> I <u>do <i>not</i></u> want to keep.</a>
</root>"""

dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(data)
a = dom.getElementsByTagName('a')[0]
for child in a.childNodes:
    if getattr(child, 'tagName', '') in ('u', 'b'):
        a.removeChild(child)

print dom.toxml()

prints:

<?xml version="1.0" ?><root>
<a>Some  text <i>that</i> I  want to keep.</a>
</root>