Parse XML with ElementTree

Question

I'm trying to parse a xml with the below content

<File version="5.6">
<Parent name="A">
<Child name="a"/>
<Child name="b"/>
</Parent>

<Parent name="B">
<Child name="c"/>
<Child name="d"/>
</Parent>

<Parent name="C">
<Child name="e"/>
<Child name="f"/>
</Parent>

</File>

And I used the following code

for child in tree.getroot().findall('./Parent/Child')
     print child.attrib.get("name")

It just print all the name of children without the parent names. Can I print the relevant parent name of each child like this?

A has a b
B has c d
C has e f

falsetru · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-14 10:59:18Z

2

Iterate over parents, then find children of the parents.

for parent in tree.findall('./Parent'):
    children = [child for child in parent.findall('./Child')]
    print '{} has {}'.format(parent.get('name'), ' '.join(c.get('name') for c in children))

Response to the comment

Using lxml, you can access parent node with getparent() method.

import lxml.etree
tree = lxml.etree.parse('1.xml')
for child in tree.findall('./Parent/Child'):
    print '{} has {}'.format(child.getparent().get('name'), child.get('name'))

edited Aug 14, 2013 at 10:59

answered Aug 14, 2013 at 9:37

falsetru

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2 Comments

Johnny Chen Over a year ago

Can I iterate all the children and find their parent instead?

falsetru Over a year ago

@JohnnyChen, You can, if you use lxml instead of xml.etree.ElementTree.

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