[FIXED] Getting text from element and element's children in order with beautifulsoup

Issue

I want to get the text of an element combined with the text of it's children elements. The element that I have looks like this.

<td>
   <a> This </a> 
   " is placement "
   <span>
       <span> text </span> 
   </span>
   " to demonstrate " 
   <span> 
        <span> my point </span>
   </span>
</td>

my initial though was to do this

children = d.findChildren()
description = ''
for child in children:
   if child.text:
       description += child.text

This just returns the text 'This text my point' because it ignores the text in the main element. How would I get the complete sentence 'This is placement text to demonstrate my point' ?

Solution

You can use .text or .get_text(). For example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_text = '''\
<td>
   <a> This </a>
   " is placement "
   <span>
       <span> text </span>
   </span>
   " to demonstrate "
   <span>
        <span> my point </span>
   </span>
</td>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_text, 'html.parser')

print(soup.td.get_text(strip=True, separator=' '))

Prints:

This " is placement " text " to demonstrate " my point

Answered By - Andrej Kesely