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Asked: 2026-05-11T22:21:46+00:00

I am using ElementTree to parse a XML file. In some fields, there will

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I am using ElementTree to parse a XML file. In some fields, there will be HTML data. For example, consider a declaration as follows:

<Course>
    <Description>Line 1<br />Line 2</Description>
</Course>

Now, supposing _course is an Element variable which hold this Couse element. I want to access this course’s description, so I do:

desc = _course.find("Description").text;

But then desc only contains “Line 1”. I read something about the .tail attribute, so I tried also:

desc = _course.find("Description").tail;

And I get the same output. What should I do to make desc be “Line 1
Line 2″ (or literally anything between and )? In other words, I’m looking for something similar to the .innerText property in C# (and many other languages I guess).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Do you have any control over the creation of the xml file? The contents of xml tags which contain xml tags (or similar), or markup chars (‘<‘, etc) should be encoded to avoid this problem. You can do this with either:

    • a CDATA section
    • Base64 or some other encoding (which doesn’t include xml reserved characters)
    • Entity encoding (‘<‘ == ‘&lt;‘)

    If you can’t make these changes, and ElementTree can’t ignore tags not included in the xml schema, then you will have to pre-process the file. Of course, you’re out of luck if the schema overlaps html.

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