Question

What is a good way to replace an HTML tag like:

Old : <div id=pgbrk" ....../>....Page Break....</div>

New : <!--page break -->

div id might have many other values hence regex is not a good idea. I need some LXML kind of thing. Basically, my problem is to replace an HTML tag with a string!

Answer 1

As long as your div has a parent tag, you could do this:

import lxml.html as LH
import lxml.etree as ET

content='<root><div id="pgbrk" ......>....Page Break....</div></root>'
doc=LH.fromstring(content)
# print(LH.tostring(doc))    
for div in doc.xpath('//div[@id="pgbrk"]'):
    parent=div.getparent()
    parent.replace(div,ET.Comment("page break"))
print(LH.tostring(doc))

yields

<root><!--page break--></root>