Get Text From Mixed Element Xml Tags With Elementtree

I'm using ElementTree to parse an XML document that I have. I am getting the text from the u tags. Some of them have mixed content that I need to filter out or keep as text. Two ex

Solution 1:

The lost text bits, "¿Sí?" and "A mí no me suena.", are available as the tail property of each <vocal> element (the text following the element's end tag).

Here is a way to get the wanted output (tested with Python 2.7).

Assume that vocal.xml looks like this:

<root><u><vocaltype="filler"><desc>eh</desc></vocal>¿Sí? 
  </u><u>Pues... 
     <vocaltype="non-ling"><desc>laugh</desc></vocal>A mí no me suena. 
  </u></root>

Code:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

root = ET.parse("vocal.xml") 

for u in root.findall(".//u"):
    v = u.find("vocal")

    if v.get("type") == "filler":
        frags = [u.text, v.findtext("desc"), v.tail]
    else:
        frags = [u.text, v.tail]

    print " ".join(t.encode("utf-8").strip() for t in frags).strip()

Output:

eh ¿Sí?
Pues... A mí no me suena.