How to insert a HTML element in a tree of lxml.html

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17235660

  •  01-06-2022
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Question

I am using python 3.3 and lxml 3.2.0

Problem: I have a web page in a variable webpageString = "<html><head></head><body>webpage content</body></html>" And I want to insert a css link tag between the two header tags, so that I get webpageString = "<html><head><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'></head><body>webpage content</body></html>"

I have written the following code:

def addCssCode(self):
    tree = html.fromstring(self.article)
    headTag = tree.xpath("//head")
    #htmlTag = tree.getroot()

    if headTag is None:
        pass    #insert the head tag first

    cssLinkString = "<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='"+ self.cssLocation+"'>"
    headTag[0].insert(1, html.HtmlElement(cssLinkString))
    print(cssLinkString)
    self.article = html.tostring(tree).decode("utf-8")

Which results in insertion of-

    <HtmlElement>&lt; link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='cssCode.css' &gt;</HtmlElement>

I also tried solution in the following page to an identical problem, but it also didn't work. python lxml append element after another element

How can I solve this? Thanks

Was it helpful?

Solution

Use .insert/.append method.

import lxml.html

def add_css_code(webpageString, linkString):
    root = lxml.html.fromstring(webpageString)
    link = lxml.html.fromstring(linkString).find('.//link')
    head = root.find('.//head')
    title = head.find('title')
    if title == None:
        where = 0
    else:
        where = head.index(title) + 1
    head.insert(where, link)
    return lxml.html.tostring(root)

webpageString1 = "<html><head><title>test</title></head><body>webpage content</body></html>"
webpageString2 = "<html><head></head><body>webpage content</body></html>"
linkString = "<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>"

print(add_css_code(webpageString1, linkString))
print(add_css_code(webpageString2, linkString))
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