How to exclude text anchored by specific tags from lxml text_content()

Question

I know there were similar questions to this, but since they didn't solve the problem, please bear with me why I go through the issue one more time.

Here's my string:

normal = """
  <p>
    <b>
      <a href='link1'>        Forget me  </a>
    </b>     I need this one      <br>
    <b>
     <a href='link2'>  Forget me too  </a>
    </b> Forget me not <i>even when</i> you go to sleep <br>
    <b>  <a href='link3'>  Forget me three  </a>
    </b>  Foremost on your mind <br>
   </p>    
"""

I start with:

target = lxml.html.fromstring(normal)
tree_struct = etree.ElementTree(target)  

Now, I basically need to ignore everything anchored by the <a> tag. But if I run this code:

for e in target.iter():
   item = target.xpath(tree_struct.getpath(e))
   if len(item)>0:
       print(item[0].text)  

I get nothing; if, on the other hand, I change the print instruction to:

  print(item[0].text_content()) 

I get this output:

Forget me
 I need this one

 Forget me too

Forget me not
even when
you go to sleep


 Forget me three

Foremost on your mind 

While my desired output is:

 I need this one

Forget me not
even when
you go to sleep    

Foremost on your mind 

Aside for giving the wrong output, it's also inelegant. So I must be missing something obvious, though I can't figure out what.

Answer 1

I think you are making this unnecessarily complicated. There is no need to create the tree_struct object and use getpath() . Here is a suggestion:

from lxml import html

normal = """
  <p>
    <b>
      <a href='link1'>        Forget me  </a>
    </b>     I need this one      <br>
    <b>
     <a href='link2'>  Forget me too  </a>
    </b> Forget me not <i>even when</i> you go to sleep <br>
    <b>  <a href='link3'>  Forget me three  </a>
    </b>  Foremost on your mind <br>
   </p>
"""

target = html.fromstring(normal)

for e in target.iter():
    if not e.tag == "a":
        # Print text content if not only whitespace 
        if e.text and e.text.strip():
            print(e.text.strip())
        # Print tail content if not only whitespace
        if e.tail and e.tail.strip():
            print(e.tail.strip())

Output:

I need this one
Forget me not
even when
you go to sleep
Foremost on your mind