getchildren() in Beautifulsoup code to LXML - beautifulsoup

Question

I have to convert some beautifulsoup code.
Basically what I want is just get all children of the body node and select which has text and store them.
Here is the code with bs4 :
def get_children(self, tag, dorecursive=False):
children = []
if not tag :
return children
for t in tag.findChildren(recursive=dorecursive):
if t.name in self.text_containers \
and len(t.text) > self.min_text_length \
and self.is_valid_tag(t):
children.append(t)
return children
this works fine
when I try this with lxml lib instead, children is empty :
def get_children(self, tag, dorecursive=False):
children = []
if not tag :
return children
tags = tag.getchildren()
for t in tags:
#print(t.tag)
if t.tag in self.text_containers \
and len(t.tail) > self.min_text_length \
and self.is_valid_tag(t):
children.append(t)
return children
any idea ?

Answer 1

Code:
import lxml.html
import requests
class TextTagManager:
TEXT_CONTAINERS = {
'li',
'p',
'span',
*[f'h{i}' for i in range(1, 6)]
}
MIN_TEXT_LENGTH = 60
def is_valid_tag(self, tag):
# put some logic here
return True
def get_children(self, tag, recursive=False):
children = []
tags = tag.findall('.//*' if recursive else '*')
for t in tags:
if (t.tag in self.TEXT_CONTAINERS and
t.text and
len(t.text) > self.MIN_TEXT_LENGTH and
self.is_valid_tag(t)):
children.append(t)
return children
manager = TextTagManager()
url = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_parsers'
html = requests.get(url).text
doc = lxml.html.fromstring(html)
for child in manager.get_children(doc, recursive=True):
print(child.tag, ' -> ', child.text)
Output:
li -> HTML traversal: offer an interface for programmers to easily access and modify of the "HTML string code". Canonical example:
li -> HTML clean: to fix invalid HTML and to improve the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. Canonical example:
.getchildren() returns all direct children. If you want to have a recursive option, you can use .findall():
tags = tag.findall('.//*' if recursive else '*')
This answer should help you understand the difference between .//tag and tag.