Get all xml attribute values in python3 using ElementTree
I have the following xml file
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank updated="yes">2</rank>
<year>2008</year>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
<neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank updated="yes">5</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
</country>
<country name="Panama">
<rank updated="yes">69</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>13600</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
<neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
</country>
</data>
I want to write python 3 code using ElementTree to get the names of all countries. Thus, the end result must be dict
either array
of
['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama']
I am trying to do this with Xpath but I am not getting anything. So my code looks like this
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(xmlfile)
root = tree.getroot()
names = root.findall("./country/@name")
However the above does not work as I feel like my xpath is wrong.
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Use findall()
to get all tags country
and get attribute name
from .attrib
dictionary:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
data = """your xml here"""
tree = ET.fromstring(data)
print([el.attrib.get('name') for el in tree.findall('.//country')])
Printing ['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama']
.
Note that you cannot get attribute values using xpath expression //country/@name
as xml.etree.ElementTree
it only provides limited support for Xpath .
FYI, lxml
provides more complete support for xpath and therefore makes it easier to get attribute values:
from lxml import etree as ET
data = """your xml here"""
tree = ET.fromstring(data)
print(tree.xpath('//country/@name'))
Printing ['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama']
.
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