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Parsing XML with Mixed Content and Attributes using lxml in Python 3.9 - Attribute Handling Issues

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-13
python xml lxml Python

I'm not sure how to approach Can someone help me understand Quick question that's been bugging me - This might be a silly question, but I'm trying to parse an XML document that has a mix of textual content and attributes, but I'm running into issues extracting the values correctly. My XML looks something like this: ```xml <items> <item id="1">Item One <description>First item description</description></item> <item id="2">Item Two <description>Second item description</description></item> <item id="3">Item Three</item> </items> ``` I want to extract each item's `id` and the text content, including the text inside the `<description>` tags, if present. I've been using the `lxml` library, but Iโ€™m not sure how to handle the mixed content properly. Hereโ€™s what Iโ€™ve tried so far: ```python from lxml import etree xml_data = '''<items>\ <item id="1">Item One <description>First item description</description></item>\ <item id="2">Item Two <description>Second item description</description></item>\ <item id="3">Item Three</item>\ </items>''' root = etree.fromstring(xml_data) for item in root.xpath('.//item'): item_id = item.get('id') text_content = item.text.strip() if item.text else '' descriptions = item.xpath('./description/text()') full_content = text_content + ' '.join(descriptions) print(f'ID: {item_id}, Content: {full_content}') ``` This code runs without errors, but the output is not what I expect. For item 1, it should show "Item One First item description" but instead, I only get "ID: 1, Content: Item One" without the description text. Iโ€™ve also checked if the items contain any text directly or if the `<description>` tag exists, but the results remain the same. I've looked into using the `etree.tostring()` method to debug and see the parsed structure, but I canโ€™t seem to pinpoint where my extraction logic is failing. Any advice on how to properly handle this mixed content scenario would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger web app I'm building. Thanks in advance! Is there a better approach? I'm developing on Windows 11 with Python. What's the correct way to implement this? Any ideas what could be causing this? Hoping someone can shed some light on this.