How do you get everything under the root element? - lxml

Question

I'm using etree to clean up some html. I realise that I have to have a root tag to hold all the elements, but I want to return the string without the root. Is there any way to do this.
from lxml import etree
fragment = etree.fromstring("<fragment>text1 <a>tex2 </a>text3<b>text4</b> <c>text 5</c>text 6<span style=''> Style</span></fragment>")
delete_tag = 'delete_me'
for element in fragment.xpath(".//span[#style='']"):
element.tag = delete_tag
etree.strip_tags(fragment, delete_tag)
print(etree.tostring(fragment))
What I get is
b'<fragment>text1 <a>tex2 </a>text3<b>text4</b> <c>text 5</c>text 6 Style</fragment>'
but I want is
text1 <a>tex2 </a>text3<b>text4</b> <c>text 5</c>text 6 Style

Answer 1

Try something along these lines:
elems = fragment.xpath('.//*')
target = ''
target+=(fragment.xpath('./text()[1]')[0])
for elem in elems:
target+=(etree.tostring(elem).decode())
target
Output:
'text1 <a>tex2 </a>text3<b>text4</b> <c>text 5</c>text 6 Style'