Getting XML attribute value with lxml module

Question

How can i get the value of an attribute of XML file with lxml module?

My XML looks like this"

<process>
   <name>somename</name>
   <statistics>
     <stats param='someparam'>
        <value>0.456</value>
        <real_value>0.4</value>
     </stats>
     <stats ...>
      .
      .
      .
     </stats>
   </statistics>
</process>

I want to get the value 0.456 from the value attribute. I'm iterating trought the attribute and getting the text but im not sure that this is the best way for doing this

for attribute in root.iter('statistics'):
   for stats in attribute:
      for param_value in stats.iter('value'):
          value = param_value.text

is there any other much easier way for doing this? something like stats.get_value('value')

jbaiter · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-16 10:57:26Z

1

Use XPath:

root.find('.//value').text

This gets you the content of the first value tag.

If you want to iterate over all value elements, use findall, this gets you a list with all the elements.

If you only want the value elements inside <stats param='someparam'> elements, make the path more specific:

root.findall("./statistics/stats[@param='someparam']/value")

edit: Note that find/findall only support a subset of XPath. If you want to make use of the whole XPath (1.x) functionality, use the xpath method.

edited Jun 16, 2014 at 10:57

answered Jun 16, 2014 at 10:38

jbaiter

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1 Comment

Pythonizer Over a year ago

root.find('value').text is exactly what i was looking for! thanks

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