Question

If I have an xml tag, such as:

<tag>
    ... abunch of stuff inside here
</tag>

How would I remove everything inside , inclusive of the tags itself?

I tried re.sub('<tag>.+</tag>', '', string) but it wasn’t working. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You could do it safely? with lxml which goes against your desire to re but you might have been persuaded by other’s comments that using re is fraught with danger.

import lxml.etree as etree

xml = """<root>
<item name="1"/>
<item name="2"/>
<tag>
    <nested>Will I die</nested>
    ... abunch of stuff inside here
</tag>
<another/>
</root>"""

root = etree.fromstring(xml)
for to_kill in root.xpath("//tag"):
    to_kill.getparent().remove(to_kill)

print etree.tostring(root,  pretty_print=True)

Gives:

<root>
<item name="1"/>
<item name="2"/>
<another/>
</root>