Get Child node in XML python

Question

I'm a newbie on python and XML and currently I'm using python 3.6 and I have this XML data in a variable

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>

What I want to do is get the "child node"? and place it to a variable like this one

var1 = '<country name="Liechtenstein">
    <rank>1</rank>
    <year>2008</year>
    <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
    <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
    <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
</country>'

var2 = '<country name="Singapore">
    <rank>4</rank>
    <year>2011</year>
    <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
    <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
</country>'

...etc

is there any way to get the result

toheedNiaz · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-03 06:40:22Z

Here is my approach to solve this :

you can make a list of all the country elements and then do some operations on that list as @holdenweb has mentioned the country nodes might be variable in each xml you have so , I am using a list to keep the nodes inside that list. you can iterate that list depending upon you requirement.

Code :

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = """<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>"""

nodeList = []
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
for nod in root.findall("country"):
    nodeList.append(ET.tostring(nod))
    print(str(ET.tostring(nod) + b"\n"))

Output :

b'<country name="Liechtenstein">\n        <rank>1</rank>\n        <year>2008</year>\n        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>\n        <neighbor direction="E" name="Austria" />\n        <neighbor direction="W" name="Switzerland" />\n    </country>\n    \n'
b'<country name="Singapore">\n        <rank>4</rank>\n        <year>2011</year>\n        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>\n        <neighbor direction="N" name="Malaysia" />\n    </country>\n    \n'
b'<country name="Panama">\n        <rank>68</rank>\n        <year>2011</year>\n        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>\n        <neighbor direction="W" name="Costa Rica" />\n        <neighbor direction="E" name="Colombia" />\n    </country>\n\n'

holdenweb · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-03 06:25:57Z

0

You probably don't want to assign each country data to its own variable, unless you are absolutely sure that the number of them is small and does not vary. Therefore it would be simplest to use looping to handle each country:

data = ...
from xml.etree import ElementTree
tree = ElementTree.fromstring(data)
countries = tree.findall("country")

You now have a list of countries that you can iterate over to analyse each one further.

for country in countries:
    print(country)

<Element 'country' at 0x10e51d818>
<Element 'country' at 0x10e535688>
<Element 'country' at 0x10e535cc8>

answered Apr 3, 2018 at 6:25

holdenweb

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3 Comments

Jaycel Cunanan Over a year ago

Thanks for the fast response is possible to get as a string?

Vikas Periyadath Over a year ago

@JaycelCunanan ET.tostring(country) you can try this one .

holdenweb Over a year ago

Do you want the string of the whole of the element's XML, or do you want to extract individual tag/attribute values? Please try to be specific.

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