Retrieve multiple xml items in a loop with elementtree

Question

I'm trying to loop over an xml file with elementtree. The file looks a bit like this:

<items>
  <item>
    <name>Blah</name>
    <price>1234</price>
  </item>
  <item>
    <name>Something</name>
    <price>2345</price>
  </item>
</items>

After reading this with elementtree, I can do this:

for element in doc.findall('/items/item/name):
  print element.text

But with one loop, I'd like to get the price too... Something like this...

for element in doc.findall('/items/item'):
  print element.name.text
  print element.price.text

...but I can't. Not sure what's next - do I need to do another "find" per "element"?

Many thanks for any help!

david.barkhuizen · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-20 18:40:10Z

4

Please read the documentation(http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html). Here is a working example:

for elem in doc.findall('item'):
   for i in  elem.getchildren():
      print i.text

outputs:

Blah 1234 Something 2345

In my code I iterate over all the items in the xml and retrieve the text assigned with its child nodes.

edited May 20, 2014 at 18:40

david.barkhuizen

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answered Feb 1, 2011 at 22:40

Piotr Duda

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Comments

thomas · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-01 23:19:35Z

2

You can use the following for granular control over returned values.

for element in doc.findall('item'): # Get the items out.
    # Iterate thought the list of items(They are in element objects)

    print 'Item' # Yey print stuff out!
    print 'Name: ', element.find('name').text
    print 'Price:', element.find('price').text

That outputs the following:

Item
Name: Blah
Price: 1234
Item
Name: Something
Price: 2345

Code first grabs all of the item elements. It then performs a find to get the price and name and prints result. This code ensures that you will always have name printed first and price printed second.

edited Feb 1, 2011 at 23:19

answered Feb 1, 2011 at 23:14

thomas

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