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

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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;