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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?





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