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Find all nodes by attribute in XML using Python 2

I have an XML file with many different nodes with the same attribute.

I was wondering if all these nodes could be found using Python and any additional package like minidom or ElementTree.

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2 answers


You can use the built-in module xml.etree.ElementTree

.

If you want all elements that have a specific attribute regardless of the attribute values, you can use the xpath expression:

//tag[@attr]

Or, if you want values:

//tag[@attr="value"]


Example (using findall()

method ):

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

data = """
<parent>
    <child attr="test">1</child>
    <child attr="something else">2</child>
    <child other_attr="other">3</child>
    <child>4</child>
    <child attr="test">5</child>
</parent>
"""

parent = ET.fromstring(data)
print [child.text for child in parent.findall('.//child[@attr]')]
print [child.text for child in parent.findall('.//child[@attr="test"]')]

Printing

['1', '2', '5']
['1', '5']
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This is a good example / start script with xpath:



# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from lxml import etree
fp = open("xml.xml")
tree = etree.parse(fp)
for el in tree.findall('//node[@attr="something"]'):
    print(el.text)
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