1. Introduction
XML can be parsed in python using the xml.etree.ElementTree library. This article shows you how to parse and extract elements, attributes and text from XML using this library.
While this library is easy to use, it loads the whole XML document into memory and hence may not be suitable for processing large XML files or where run-time memory is an issue.
2. Sample XML
Here is a short snippet of the sample XML we will be working with.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<catalog>
<book id="bk101">
<author>Gambardella, Matthew</author>
<title>XML Developer's Guide</title>
<genre>Computer</genre>
<price>44.95</price>
<publish_date>2000-10-01</publish_date>
<description>An in-depth look at creating applications
with XML.</description>
</book>
<book id="bk102">
<author>Ralls, Kim</author>
<title>Midnight Rain</title>
...
3. Getting Started
3.1 Parsing an XML File
It is very simple to parse an XML using ElementTree. The following returns an ElementTree object which contains all the XML artifacts.
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('catalog.xml')
Once you have the ElementTree object, you can get the root Element object using the tree.getroot() method:
root = tree.getroot()
3.2 Parsing an XML String
We use the ElementTree.fromstring() method to parse an XML string. The method returns root Element directly: a subtle difference compared with the ElementTree.parse() method which returns an ElementTree object.
print ET.fromstring('<a><b>1</b>2</a>')
# prints "<Element 'a' at ...>"
4. Working with Elements
From the Element object, you can get the XML tag name using the tag property.
print root.tag # outputs "catalog"
Get a list of child Elements from any Element object using element.findall(‘*’). You can find specific children by name by passing the name of the tag e.g. element.findall(‘book’).
For example, the following code recursively processes all the elements in the XML and prints the name of the tag.
def show(elem):
print elem.tag
for child in elem.findall('*'):
show(child)
show(root)
The above code can be modified to show nicely indented output of the tag names:
def show(elem, indent = 0);
print ' ' * indent + elem.tag
for child in elem.findall('*'):
show(elem, indent + 1)
show(root)
To find a single element by name, use elem.find(tagName):
print root.find('book').tag # prints "book"
5. Working with Attributes
XML attributes can be extracted from an Element object using the element.items() method which returns a sequence of name, value pairs. (The name-value pairs are returned in random order, not in the order they appear in the XML.)
for attrName, attrValue in elem.items():
print attrName + '=' + attrValue
To retrieve a single attribute value by name, use the elem.get(attrName) method:
print root.find('book').get('id') # prints "bk101"
Get a list of all attribute names defined on the element using elem.keys(). Returns an empty list if no attributes are defined.
print root.find('book').keys()
# prints ['id']
To get all the attributes as a python dictionary, use the elem.attrib property:
print root.find('book').attrib
# prints {'id': 'bk101'}
6. Retrieving Element Text Content
You can retrieve an element’s text content using the elem.text property as follows:
print ET.fromstring('<a>Hello<b>1</b>2</a>').text
# prints "Hello"
print ET.fromstring('<a>Hello<b>1</b>2</a>').find('b').text
#prints "1"
Text appearing after the element’s end tag is retrieved using elem.tail property:
print ET.fromstring('<a>Hello<b>1</b>2</a>').find('b').tail
# prints "2"
7. Using Path to Extract Content
Some of the Element object methods support extracting content by using a syntax similar to XPath:
Retrieve a descendant element:
print root.find('book/author').text
# prints "Gambardella, Matthew"
To obtain the text of the first matching element, use the elem.findtext() method as follows:
print root.findtext('book/author')
#prints "Gambardella, Matthew"
Retrieve and process a list of matching elements using elem.findall():
for e in root.findall('book/author'):
print e.text
# prints the following
Gambardella, Matthew
Ralls, Kim
Corets, Eva
Corets, Eva
Corets, Eva
Randall, Cynthia
Thurman, Paula
Knorr, Stefan
Kress, Peter
O'Brien, Tim
O'Brien, Tim
Galos, Mike
Find a specific element by position. (Position indexes start with 1).
print root.find('book[2]/author').text
# prints "Ralls, Kim"
Here is an example to find and concatenate all text content using a reduce operation:
reduce(lambda x, y: x + '|' + y.text, root.findall("book/author"), '')
# prints "|Gambardella, Matthew|Ralls, Kim|Corets, Eva|Corets, Eva|Corets, Eva|Randall, Cynthia|Thurman, Paula|Knorr, Stefan|Kress, Peter|O'Brien, Tim|O'Brien, Tim|Galos, Mike"
Conclusion
This article demonstrated some aspects of parsing XML with python. We showed how to parse an XML file or an XML string and extract elements, attributes and text content.