lxml - The Python XML Toolkit

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April 2026

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Re: what you can and cannot do with lxml etree.strip_tags
by jholg＠gmx.de April 14, 2026

April 14, 2026

Hi, On Montag, 13. April 2026 22:14:09 CEST Martin Mueller wrote: > Many thanks for your helpful response. I did indeed leave out the critical > detail of the number of hi children. > > This was the code that used strip_tags > > > def process_tree(tree,filename, item): > for text in tree.iter(tei + 'text'): > for hi in text.iter(tei + 'hi'): > if len(hi) == 1 : > etree.strip_tags(text, tei+ 'hi') > > This ignore the "len(hi) == 1" condition and drops all hi elements but > leaves the children in place. It would be nice if there were a way of > telling strip_tags only to remove hi elements that meet some condition. > That said, it's easy enough to use the addnext() method and loop through > the hi element in reverse order. > > The URL you sent me got wrapped in some security garbage and was missing > something at the end. I couldn't open it, but it looked like a useful > source. Could you send it again? That was actually a mailing list link to a previous conversation of yours on the lxml mailing list from March 7th 2026: https://mail.python.org/archives/list/lxml@python.org/message/ 2F7ZICTGEBIQEHRUOSGUE7DZQ7OAA4AZ/ Be aware that that my mailer may put in an unwanted line break so you might need to make sure you copy the full link to the browser. It's a nice tip by Jens Tröger, quoting him here for convenience: " Are you familiar with XPath? I think for w in tree.xpath("//hi[count(w) < 4]/w"): w.attrib["rend"] = "hi" # Add the @rend attribute to the <w> children. hi = w.getparent() # Get the <hi> parent. hi.tag = "hi-remove-me" # Change the <hi> element’s tag so we can find it. etree.strip_tags(tree, "hi-remove-me") # Not sure about the ns here. should get you started… 🤔 Jens " Best, Holger

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what you can and cannot do with lxml etree.strip_tags
by Martin Mueller April 13, 2026

April 13, 2026

Lxml is an excellent program, but its documentation is very terse, and often assumes a reader who already "sort of" knows what the actual reader does not. Steven Pinker in his Sense of Style has a chapter on "The Curse of Knowledge" with the wonderful topic sentence: "The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imaging what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know". I had trouble with etree.strip_tags but discovered that you can't add secondary constraints to a strip_tag command. Thus you can strip all "hi" children of a div, but you cannot do this for <hi> tags with less than child elements. Is that the case? ) If you want to operate on <hi> elements with further specification, you select them and then use the "addnext" method, looping through the <hi> element in reverse order. Is that correct? Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University

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