Title: Extract text from XML document
Submitter: Paul Prescod (other recipes)
Last Updated: 2001/06/14
Version no: 1.1
Category: XML

Description:

People often ask how to extract the text from an XML document. This small program does it.

Source: Text Source

from xml.sax.handler import ContentHandler
import xml.sax
import sys

class textHandler(ContentHandler):
    def characters(self, ch):
        sys.stdout.write(ch.encode("Latin-1"))

parser = xml.sax.make_parser()
handler = textHandler()
parser.setContentHandler(handler)
parser.parse("test.xml")

Discussion:

Sometimes you want to get rid of XML tags to re-key a document, or to spell check it. This will work with any well-formed XML document. It is quite efficient. If the document isn't well-formed, you could try a solution based on the xml lexer described in another recipe called "XML lexing".