Develop Reference

Get element's text with CDATA

Say, I have an element:
>>> el = etree.XML('<tag><![CDATA[content]]></tag>')
>>> el.text
'content'
What I'd like to get is <![CDATA[content]]>. How can I go about it?

When you do el.text, that's always going to give you the plain text content.
To see the serialized element try tostring() instead:
el = etree.XML('<tag><![CDATA[content]]></tag>')
print(etree.tostring(el).decode())
this will print:
<tag>content</tag>
To preserve the CDATA, you need to use an XMLParser() with strip_cdata=False:
parser = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata=False)
el = etree.XML('<tag><![CDATA[content]]></tag>', parser=parser)
print(etree.tostring(el).decode())
This will print:
<tag><![CDATA[content]]></tag>
This should be sufficient to fulfill your "I want to make sure in a test that content is wrapped in CDATA" requirement.

You might consider using BeautifulSoup and look for CDATA instances:
import bs4
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
data='''<tag><![CDATA[content]]></tag>'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'html.parser')
"<![CDATA[{}]]>".format(soup.find(text=lambda x: isinstance(x, bs4.CData)))
Output
<![CDATA[content]]>

How do I check if the text between two closed tags XML exists or not in minidom-

My sample xmlis like this:
<name></name>
<salary>19099</salary>
How do I check if the text between two closed tags i.e "<name>" exists or not in minidom.
What to do if it is blank?
If the text doesn't exists, it should continue with next iterartion.

You should have provided us with an XML sample data to work with. Otherwise, here is a dirty example:
>>> from xml.dom import minidom
>>> s = '<example>19099</example>'
>>> xmldom = minidom.parseString(s)
>>> elts = xmldom.getElementsByTagName('example')
>>> for elt in elts:
... if elt.childNodes[0].nodeValue == '19099':
... print 'It exists'
...
It exists
Update:
The tags you provided did not appear before I formatted your question. So here is the answer: you can check if there are child nodes relative to the <name> tags:
>>> s2 = '<name></name>'
>>> xmldom = minidom.parseString(s2)
>>> elements = xmldom.getElementsByTagName('name')
>>> for element in elements:
... if len(element.childNodes)>0:
... print 'There is a name text there'
...
>>>
But this depends on how your XML data is really structured. My solution works if the XML data is as you shared it here: <name></name>.

How could I get (print) all inner html from node which I select using python's lxml etree and xpath?

How could I get all inner html from node which I select using etree xpath:
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> doc = '<foo><bar><div>привет привет</div></bar></foo>'
>>> hparser = etree.HTMLParser()
>>> htree = etree.parse(StringIO(doc), hparser)
>>> foo_element = htree.xpath("//foo")
How could I now print all foo_element's inner HTML as text? I need to get this:
<bar><div>привет привет</div></bar>
BTW when I tried to use lxml.html.tostring I get strange output:
>>> import lxml.etree
>>> lxml.html.tostring(foo_element[0])
'<foo><bar><div>привет првиет</div></bar></foo>'

You can apply the same technique as shown in this other SO post. Example in the context of this question :
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> from lxml import html
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> doc = '<foo><bar><div>TEST NODE</div></bar></foo>'
>>> hparser = etree.HTMLParser()
>>> htree = etree.parse(StringIO(doc), hparser)
>>> foo_element = htree.xpath("//foo")
>>> print ''.join(html.tostring(e) for e in foo_element[0])
<bar><div>TEST NODE</div></bar>
Or to handle case when the element may contain text node child :
>>> doc = '<foo>text node child<bar><div>TEST NODE</div></bar></foo>'
>>> htree = etree.parse(StringIO(doc), hparser)
>>> foo_element = htree.xpath("//foo")
>>> print foo_element[0].text + ''.join(html.tostring(e) for e in foo_element[0])
text node child<bar><div>TEST NODE</div></bar>
Refactoring the code into a separate function as shown in the linked post is strongly advised for the real case.

python re module group, how to extract all matching group?

 I have something confuse about the re module.
 Supose I have the following text:
<grp>
<i>i1</i>
<i>i2</i>
<i>i3</i>
...
</grp>
 I use the following re to extract the <i></i> part of the text:
>>> t = "<grp> <i>i1</i> <i>i2</i> <i>i3</i> ... </grp>"
>>> import re
>>> re.match("<grp>.*(<i>.*?</i>).*</grp>", t).group(1)
'<i>i3</i>'
>>>
 I only get the last match items.
 My question is how can extract all the match items using only reg expression? for example: extract <i>i1</i> <i>i2</i> <i>i3</i> in a list ['<i>i1</i>', '<i>i2</i>', '<i>i3</i>']
  Thanks a lot!

You can easily do that using re.findall():
import re
result = re.findall("<i>.*?</i>", t)
>>> print result
['<i>i1</i>', '<i>i2</i>', '<i>i3</i>']

Why don't use an XML parser, like xml.etree.ElementTree from Python standard library:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
data = """
<grp>
<i>i1</i>
<i>i2</i>
<i>i3</i>
</grp>
"""
tree = ET.fromstring(data)
results = tree.findall('.//i')
print [ET.tostring(el).strip() for el in results]
print [el.text for el in results] # if you need just text inside the tags
Prints:
['<i>i1</i>', '<i>i2</i>', '<i>i3</i>']
['i1', 'i2', 'i3']

How would one remove the CDATA tags from but preserve the actual data in Python using LXML or BeautifulSoup

I have some XML I am parsing in which I am using BeautifulSoup as the parser. I pull the CDATA out with the following code, but I only want the data and not the CDATA TAGS.
myXML = open("c:\myfile.xml", "r")
soup = BeautifulSoup(myXML)
data = soup.find(text=re.compile("CDATA"))
print data
<![CDATA[TEST DATA]]>
What I would like to see if the following output:
TEST DATA
I don't care if the solution is in LXML or BeautifulSoup. Just want the best or easiest way to get the job done. Thanks!
Here is a solution:
parser = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata=False)
root = etree.parse(self.param1, parser)
data = root.findall('./config/script')
for item in data: # iterate through list to find text contained in elements containing CDATA
print item.text

Based on the lxml docs:
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> parser = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata=False)
>>> root = etree.XML('<root><data><![CDATA[test]]></data></root>', parser)
>>> data = root.findall('data')
>>> for item in data: # iterate through list to find text contained in elements containing CDATA
print item.text
test # just the text of <![CDATA[test]]>
This might be the best way to get the job done, depending on how amenable your xml structure is to this approach.

Based on BeautifulSoup:
>>> str='<xml> <MsgType><![CDATA[text]]></MsgType> </xml>'
>>> soup=BeautifulSoup(str, "xml")
>>> soup.MsgType.get_text()
u'text'
>>> soup.MsgType.string
u'text'
>>> soup.MsgType.text
u'text'
As the result, it just print the text from msgtype;