Jérôme Laurens added the comment: The totsstring(..., method='text') is not suitable for the inner text because it adds the tail of the top element. A proper implementation would be def innertext(elt): return (elt.text or '') +''.join(innertext(e)+e.tail for e in elt) that can be included in the doc instead of the mention of the to string trick ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker http://bugs.python.org/issue24079 _______________________________________