XML Parsing Child Elements using xml.etree.ElementTree

Question

I'm trying to get return all UK artists in alphabetical order--I'm not fully understanding XML parsing. What I've gathered from debugging and the documentation is that when you use the findall() method it returns a list that cannot be further navigated, is this correct? So how do I iterate over the subelements of a parent node, in this case <cd>, to find all of the elements whose country=='UK'? Thanks in advance!

def get_uk_artists(xmlstr):
      xml = ET.fromstring(xmlstr)
      artist_list = []
      for each in xml.findall('cd'):
          if each.findall('./cd/country').text == 'UK':
              artist_list.append(each.findall('artist').text)
      return artist_list.sort()

The XML is:

 xml_doc ='''<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
    <catalog>
        <cd>
            <title>Empire Burlesque</title>
            <artist sex="male">Bob Dylan</artist>
            <country>USA</country>
            <company>Columbia</company>
            <price>10.90</price>
            <year>1985</year>
        </cd>
        <cd>
            <title>Hide your heart</title>
            <artist sex="female">Bonnie Tyler</artist>
            <country>UK</country>
            <company>CBS Records</company>
            <price>9.90</price>
            <year>1988</year>
        </cd>
        <cd>
            <title>Greatest Hits</title>
            <artist sex="female">Dolly Parton</artist>
            <country>USA</country>
            <company>RCA</company>
            <price>9.90</price>
            <year>1982</year>
        </cd>
        <cd>
            <title>Still got the blues</title>
            <artist sex="male">Gary Moore</artist>
            <country>UK</country>
            <company>Virgin records</company>
            <price>10.20</price>
            <year>1990</year>
        </cd>
    </catalog>
    '''

gtlambert · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-27 16:54:15Z

2

You could use:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = ET.fromstring(xml_doc)
artists = []
for cd in xml.findall('cd'):
    if cd.find('country').text == 'UK':
        artists.append(cd.find('artist').text)

artists.sort()
print(artists)

Output

['Bonnie Tyler', 'Gary Moore']

This loops over each cd in the document. If the cd has a country child element with text equal to 'UK', the cd artist name gets appended to the list of artists. artists.sort() then sorts the list in-place.

answered Jan 27, 2016 at 16:54

gtlambert

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3 Comments

Iz M Over a year ago

Thanks @lambo477 --it did the trick! I have a couple questions: 1. I tried artists.sort(), but it returned an empty list. However sorted(artists) worked, any ideas why this is? 2. When we call the findall() method, what structure does it return?

gtlambert Over a year ago

artists.sort() will return None, but it sorts the list 'in-place'. Run print(artists) and you will see the sorted list. To use sorted() returns a list, so you would need to use artists = sorted(artists).

gtlambert Over a year ago

xml.findall() returns a list of elements

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