How to use python to find the element and replace the value in the same name of element in xml file?

Question

I'm trying to find all value of element "name" which is not "None" and replace them with a new value "Anderson". So I hope the two "Tom, "John" and "Mary" would be replaced with "Anderson", but the name "None" of number 7777 won't be changed.

<aaa>
  <bbb>
    <name>Tom</name><number>1111</number>
    <name>Tom</name><number>2222</number>
    <name>John</name><number>3333</number>
  </bbb>
  <ccc>
    <name>None</name><number>7777</number>
    <name>Mary</name><number>8888</number>
  </ccc>
</aaa>

I only know how to use "tree.find()" to replace one value of specific element, but I don't know how to find and replace all.

For example:

a = tree.find('aaa/bbb/name')
tree.find('aaa/bbb/name').text = 'Anderson'

Does any one can give me an example for reach the requirement? Many thanks.

Wafflesys · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-14 08:31:06Z

1

The following XPath expression can retrieve the nodes your asking .//name[text()!='None'] ElementTree has very limited XPath support though and I'm not sure it supports the text() function.

An alternative would be:

for name in tree.findall(".//name"):
    if name.text == 'None': continue
    # Do stuff here
    name.text = "Anderson"

https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.findall

edited Jun 14, 2018 at 8:31

answered Jun 14, 2018 at 8:25

Wafflesys

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2 Comments

dnisqa2 delta Over a year ago

It can reach my requirement! Thanks for your help!

Jean-François Fabre Over a year ago

@dnisqa2delta don't forget you can accept and upvote useful answers

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