import - Converting XMLElement objects to plain text

Short version: How can I convert an XMLElement that represents part of a HTML document to plain text?

Long version: The more general problem is extracting information from webpages. We can import the webpage as an XMLObject and extract the relevant part. But this may still be a complex expression of many nested XMLElements (several paragraphs, links, emphasis, etc.), while I'm typically only interested in the text.

Let's take a random example: extracting the text from this article. Using the developer tools of any modern browser it's easy to find out that the relevant part is in a div with id="article-body-blocks". So we do

page = Import[
   "http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/nov/13/science-enforced-humility",

   "XMLObject"];

body = Cases[page, 
   XMLElement["div", {"id" -> "article-body-blocks"}, ___], Infinity];

The body is still a compound expression. Is there a built-in, direct way to extract the text?

My workaround is

ImportString[ExportString[First@body, "XML"], "HTML"]

but this is a hack (i.e. fragile, likely to break in future versions or with an input I didn't anticipate). Is there anything specifically meant for this purpose?

Comments

plotting - Filling between two spheres in SphericalPlot3D

Manipulate[ SphericalPlot3D[{1, 2 - n}, {θ, 0, Pi}, {ϕ, 0, 1.5 Pi}, Mesh -> None, PlotPoints -> 15, PlotRange -> {-2.2, 2.2}], {n, 0, 1}] I cant' seem to be able to make a filling between two spheres. I've already tried the obvious Filling -> {1 -> {2}} but Mathematica doesn't seem to like that option. Is there any easy way around this or ... Answer There is no built-in filling in SphericalPlot3D . One option is to use ParametricPlot3D to draw the surfaces between the two shells: Manipulate[ Show[SphericalPlot3D[{1, 2 - n}, {θ, 0, Pi}, {ϕ, 0, 1.5 Pi}, PlotPoints -> 15, PlotRange -> {-2.2, 2.2}], ParametricPlot3D[{ r {Sin[t] Cos[1.5 Pi], Sin[t] Sin[1.5 Pi], Cos[t]}, r {Sin[t] Cos[0 Pi], Sin[t] Sin[0 Pi], Cos[t]}}, {r, 1, 2 - n}, {t, 0, Pi}, PlotStyle -> Yellow, Mesh -> {2, 15}]], {n, 0, 1}]

plotting - Plot 4D data with color as 4th dimension

I have a list of 4D data (x position, y position, amplitude, wavelength). I want to plot x, y, and amplitude on a 3D plot and have the color of the points correspond to the wavelength. I have seen many examples using functions to define color but my wavelength cannot be expressed by an analytic function. Is there a simple way to do this? Answer Here a another possible way to visualize 4D data: data = Flatten[Table[{x, y, x^2 + y^2, Sin[x - y]}, {x, -Pi, Pi,Pi/10}, {y,-Pi,Pi, Pi/10}], 1]; You can use the function Point along with VertexColors . Now the points are places using the first three elements and the color is determined by the fourth. In this case I used Hue, but you can use whatever you prefer. Graphics3D[ Point[data[[All, 1 ;; 3]], VertexColors -> Hue /@ data[[All, 4]]], Axes -> True, BoxRatios -> {1, 1, 1/GoldenRatio}]

plotting - Mathematica: 3D plot based on combined 2D graphs

I have several sigmoidal fits to 3 different datasets, with mean fit predictions plus the 95% confidence limits (not symmetrical around the mean) and the actual data. I would now like to show these different 2D plots projected in 3D as in but then using proper perspective. In the link here they give some solutions to combine the plots using isometric perspective, but I would like to use proper 3 point perspective. Any thoughts? Also any way to show the mean points per time point for each series plus or minus the standard error on the mean would be cool too, either using points+vertical bars, or using spheres plus tubes. Below are some test data and the fit function I am using. Note that I am working on a logit(proportion) scale and that the final vertical scale is Log10(percentage). (* some test data *) data = Table[Null, {i, 4}]; data[[1]] = {{1, -5.8}, {2, -5.4}, {3, -0.8}, {4, -0.2}, {5, 4.6}, {1, -6.4}, {2, -5.6}, {3, -0.7}, {4, 0.04}, {5, 1.0}, {1, -6.8}, {2, -4.7}, {3, -1.

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