Why does this element in lxml include the tail?
html, lxml, python
Solution
Specifying `with_tail=False` will remove the tail text.
print(etree.tostring(element, encoding="unicode", pretty_print=True, with_tail=False))
See `lxml.etree.tostring` documentation.
Problem
Consider this Python script: ``` from lxml import etree html = ''' <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head></head> <body> <p>This is some text followed with 2 citations.<span class="footnote">1</span> <span сlass="footnote">2</span>This is some more text.</p> </body> </html>''' tree = etree.fromstring(html) for element in tree.findall(".//{*}span"): if element.get("class") == 'footnote': print(etree.tostring(element, encoding="unicode", pretty_print=True)) ``` The desired output would be the 2 `span` elements, instead I get: ``` <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="footnote">1</span> <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="footnote">2</span>This is some more text. ``` Why does it include the text after the element until the end of the parent element? I'm trying to use lxml to link footnotes and when I `a.insert()` the `span` element into the `a` element I create for it, it's including the text after and so linking large amounts of text I don't want linked.