20.5. xml.etree.ElementTree
— The ElementTree XML API¶
Source code: Lib/xml/etree/ElementTree.py
The xml.etree.ElementTree
module implements a simple and efficient API
for parsing and creating XML data.
Distinto en la versión 3.3: This module will use a fast implementation whenever available.
The xml.etree.cElementTree
module is deprecated.
Advertencia
The xml.etree.ElementTree
module is not secure against
maliciously constructed data. If you need to parse untrusted or
unauthenticated data see XML vulnerabilities.
20.5.1. Tutorial¶
This is a short tutorial for using xml.etree.ElementTree
(ET
in
short). The goal is to demonstrate some of the building blocks and basic
concepts of the module.
20.5.1.1. XML tree and elements¶
XML is an inherently hierarchical data format, and the most natural way to
represent it is with a tree. ET
has two classes for this purpose -
ElementTree
represents the whole XML document as a tree, and
Element
represents a single node in this tree. Interactions with
the whole document (reading and writing to/from files) are usually done
on the ElementTree
level. Interactions with a single XML element
and its sub-elements are done on the Element
level.
20.5.1.2. Parsing XML¶
We’ll be using the following XML document as the sample data for this section:
<?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>
We can import this data by reading from a file:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('country_data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
Or directly from a string:
root = ET.fromstring(country_data_as_string)
fromstring()
parses XML from a string directly into an Element
,
which is the root element of the parsed tree. Other parsing functions may
create an ElementTree
. Check the documentation to be sure.
As an Element
, root
has a tag and a dictionary of attributes:
>>> root.tag
'data'
>>> root.attrib
{}
It also has children nodes over which we can iterate:
>>> for child in root:
... print(child.tag, child.attrib)
...
country {'name': 'Liechtenstein'}
country {'name': 'Singapore'}
country {'name': 'Panama'}
Children are nested, and we can access specific child nodes by index:
>>> root[0][1].text
'2008'
Nota
Not all elements of the XML input will end up as elements of the
parsed tree. Currently, this module skips over any XML comments,
processing instructions, and document type declarations in the
input. Nevertheless, trees built using this module’s API rather
than parsing from XML text can have comments and processing
instructions in them; they will be included when generating XML
output. A document type declaration may be accessed by passing a
custom TreeBuilder
instance to the XMLParser
constructor.
20.5.1.3. Pull API for non-blocking parsing¶
Most parsing functions provided by this module require the whole document
to be read at once before returning any result. It is possible to use an
XMLParser
and feed data into it incrementally, but it is a push API that
calls methods on a callback target, which is too low-level and inconvenient for
most needs. Sometimes what the user really wants is to be able to parse XML
incrementally, without blocking operations, while enjoying the convenience of
fully constructed Element
objects.
The most powerful tool for doing this is XMLPullParser
. It does not
require a blocking read to obtain the XML data, and is instead fed with data
incrementally with XMLPullParser.feed()
calls. To get the parsed XML
elements, call XMLPullParser.read_events()
. Here is an example:
>>> parser = ET.XMLPullParser(['start', 'end'])
>>> parser.feed('<mytag>sometext')
>>> list(parser.read_events())
[('start', <Element 'mytag' at 0x7fa66db2be58>)]
>>> parser.feed(' more text</mytag>')
>>> for event, elem in parser.read_events():
... print(event)
... print(elem.tag, 'text=', elem.text)
...
end
The obvious use case is applications that operate in a non-blocking fashion where the XML data is being received from a socket or read incrementally from some storage device. In such cases, blocking reads are unacceptable.
Because it’s so flexible, XMLPullParser
can be inconvenient to use for
simpler use-cases. If you don’t mind your application blocking on reading XML
data but would still like to have incremental parsing capabilities, take a look
at iterparse()
. It can be useful when you’re reading a large XML document
and don’t want to hold it wholly in memory.
20.5.1.4. Finding interesting elements¶
Element
has some useful methods that help iterate recursively over all
the sub-tree below it (its children, their children, and so on). For example,
Element.iter()
:
>>> for neighbor in root.iter('neighbor'):
... print(neighbor.attrib)
...
{'name': 'Austria', 'direction': 'E'}
{'name': 'Switzerland', 'direction': 'W'}
{'name': 'Malaysia', 'direction': 'N'}
{'name': 'Costa Rica', 'direction': 'W'}
{'name': 'Colombia', 'direction': 'E'}
Element.findall()
finds only elements with a tag which are direct
children of the current element. Element.find()
finds the first child
with a particular tag, and Element.text
accesses the element’s text
content. Element.get()
accesses the element’s attributes:
>>> for country in root.findall('country'):
... rank = country.find('rank').text
... name = country.get('name')
... print(name, rank)
...
Liechtenstein 1
Singapore 4
Panama 68
More sophisticated specification of which elements to look for is possible by using XPath.
20.5.1.5. Modifying an XML File¶
ElementTree
provides a simple way to build XML documents and write them to files.
The ElementTree.write()
method serves this purpose.
Once created, an Element
object may be manipulated by directly changing
its fields (such as Element.text
), adding and modifying attributes
(Element.set()
method), as well as adding new children (for example
with Element.append()
).
Let’s say we want to add one to each country’s rank, and add an updated
attribute to the rank element:
>>> for rank in root.iter('rank'):
... new_rank = int(rank.text) + 1
... rank.text = str(new_rank)
... rank.set('updated', 'yes')
...
>>> tree.write('output.xml')
Our XML now looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank updated="yes">2</rank>
<year>2008</year>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
<neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank updated="yes">5</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
</country>
<country name="Panama">
<rank updated="yes">69</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>13600</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
<neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
</country>
</data>
We can remove elements using Element.remove()
. Let’s say we want to
remove all countries with a rank higher than 50:
>>> for country in root.findall('country'):
... rank = int(country.find('rank').text)
... if rank > 50:
... root.remove(country)
...
>>> tree.write('output.xml')
Our XML now looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank updated="yes">2</rank>
<year>2008</year>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
<neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank updated="yes">5</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
</country>
</data>
20.5.1.6. Building XML documents¶
The SubElement()
function also provides a convenient way to create new
sub-elements for a given element:
>>> a = ET.Element('a')
>>> b = ET.SubElement(a, 'b')
>>> c = ET.SubElement(a, 'c')
>>> d = ET.SubElement(c, 'd')
>>> ET.dump(a)
<a><b /><c><d /></c></a>
20.5.1.7. Parsing XML with Namespaces¶
If the XML input has namespaces, tags and attributes
with prefixes in the form prefix:sometag
get expanded to
{uri}sometag
where the prefix is replaced by the full URI.
Also, if there is a default namespace,
that full URI gets prepended to all of the non-prefixed tags.
Here is an XML example that incorporates two namespaces, one with the prefix «fictional» and the other serving as the default namespace:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<actors xmlns:fictional="http://characters.example.com"
xmlns="http://people.example.com">
<actor>
<name>John Cleese</name>
<fictional:character>Lancelot</fictional:character>
<fictional:character>Archie Leach</fictional:character>
</actor>
<actor>
<name>Eric Idle</name>
<fictional:character>Sir Robin</fictional:character>
<fictional:character>Gunther</fictional:character>
<fictional:character>Commander Clement</fictional:character>
</actor>
</actors>
One way to search and explore this XML example is to manually add the
URI to every tag or attribute in the xpath of a
find()
or findall()
:
root = fromstring(xml_text)
for actor in root.findall('{http://people.example.com}actor'):
name = actor.find('{http://people.example.com}name')
print(name.text)
for char in actor.findall('{http://characters.example.com}character'):
print(' |-->', char.text)
A better way to search the namespaced XML example is to create a dictionary with your own prefixes and use those in the search functions:
ns = {'real_person': 'http://people.example.com',
'role': 'http://characters.example.com'}
for actor in root.findall('real_person:actor', ns):
name = actor.find('real_person:name', ns)
print(name.text)
for char in actor.findall('role:character', ns):
print(' |-->', char.text)
These two approaches both output:
John Cleese
|--> Lancelot
|--> Archie Leach
Eric Idle
|--> Sir Robin
|--> Gunther
|--> Commander Clement
20.5.1.8. Additional resources¶
See http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm for tutorials and links to other docs.
20.5.2. XPath support¶
This module provides limited support for XPath expressions for locating elements in a tree. The goal is to support a small subset of the abbreviated syntax; a full XPath engine is outside the scope of the module.
20.5.2.1. Example¶
Here’s an example that demonstrates some of the XPath capabilities of the
module. We’ll be using the countrydata
XML document from the
Parsing XML section:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.fromstring(countrydata)
# Top-level elements
root.findall(".")
# All 'neighbor' grand-children of 'country' children of the top-level
# elements
root.findall("./country/neighbor")
# Nodes with name='Singapore' that have a 'year' child
root.findall(".//year/..[@name='Singapore']")
# 'year' nodes that are children of nodes with name='Singapore'
root.findall(".//*[@name='Singapore']/year")
# All 'neighbor' nodes that are the second child of their parent
root.findall(".//neighbor[2]")
20.5.2.2. Supported XPath syntax¶
Syntax | Meaning |
---|---|
tag |
Selects all child elements with the given tag.
For example, spam selects all child elements
named spam , and spam/egg selects all
grandchildren named egg in all children named
spam . |
* |
Selects all child elements. For example, */egg
selects all grandchildren named egg . |
. |
Selects the current node. This is mostly useful at the beginning of the path, to indicate that it’s a relative path. |
// |
Selects all subelements, on all levels beneath the
current element. For example, .//egg selects
all egg elements in the entire tree. |
.. |
Selects the parent element. Returns None if the
path attempts to reach the ancestors of the start
element (the element find was called on). |
[@attrib] |
Selects all elements that have the given attribute. |
[@attrib='value'] |
Selects all elements for which the given attribute has the given value. The value cannot contain quotes. |
[tag] |
Selects all elements that have a child named
tag . Only immediate children are supported. |
[tag='text'] |
Selects all elements that have a child named
tag whose complete text content, including
descendants, equals the given text . |
[position] |
Selects all elements that are located at the given
position. The position can be either an integer
(1 is the first position), the expression last()
(for the last position), or a position relative to
the last position (e.g. last()-1 ). |
Predicates (expressions within square brackets) must be preceded by a tag
name, an asterisk, or another predicate. position
predicates must be
preceded by a tag name.
20.5.3. Reference¶
20.5.3.1. Functions¶
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
Comment
(text=None)¶ Comment element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML comment by the standard serializer. The comment string can be either a bytestring or a Unicode string. text is a string containing the comment string. Returns an element instance representing a comment.
Note that
XMLParser
skips over comments in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. AnElementTree
will only contain comment nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of theElement
methods.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
dump
(elem)¶ Writes an element tree or element structure to sys.stdout. This function should be used for debugging only.
The exact output format is implementation dependent. In this version, it’s written as an ordinary XML file.
elem is an element tree or an individual element.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
fromstring
(text)¶ Parses an XML section from a string constant. Same as
XML()
. text is a string containing XML data. Returns anElement
instance.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
fromstringlist
(sequence, parser=None)¶ Parses an XML document from a sequence of string fragments. sequence is a list or other sequence containing XML data fragments. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard
XMLParser
parser is used. Returns anElement
instance.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
iselement
(element)¶ Checks if an object appears to be a valid element object. element is an element instance. Returns a true value if this is an element object.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
iterparse
(source, events=None, parser=None)¶ Parses an XML section into an element tree incrementally, and reports what’s going on to the user. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings
"start"
,"end"
,"start-ns"
and"end-ns"
(the «ns» events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only"end"
events are reported. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standardXMLParser
parser is used. parser must be a subclass ofXMLParser
and can only use the defaultTreeBuilder
as a target. Returns an iterator providing(event, elem)
pairs.Note that while
iterparse()
builds the tree incrementally, it issues blocking reads on source (or the file it names). As such, it’s unsuitable for applications where blocking reads can’t be made. For fully non-blocking parsing, seeXMLPullParser
.Nota
iterparse()
only guarantees that it has seen the «>» character of a starting tag when it emits a «start» event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.If you need a fully populated element, look for «end» events instead.
Obsoleto desde la versión 3.4: The parser argument.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
parse
(source, parser=None)¶ Parses an XML section into an element tree. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard
XMLParser
parser is used. Returns anElementTree
instance.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
ProcessingInstruction
(target, text=None)¶ PI element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML processing instruction. target is a string containing the PI target. text is a string containing the PI contents, if given. Returns an element instance, representing a processing instruction.
Note that
XMLParser
skips over processing instructions in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. AnElementTree
will only contain processing instruction nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of theElement
methods.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
register_namespace
(prefix, uri)¶ Registers a namespace prefix. The registry is global, and any existing mapping for either the given prefix or the namespace URI will be removed. prefix is a namespace prefix. uri is a namespace uri. Tags and attributes in this namespace will be serialized with the given prefix, if at all possible.
Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
SubElement
(parent, tag, attrib={}, **extra)¶ Subelement factory. This function creates an element instance, and appends it to an existing element.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. parent is the parent element. tag is the subelement name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments. Returns an element instance.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
tostring
(element, encoding="us-ascii", method="xml", *, short_empty_elements=True)¶ Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an
Element
instance. encoding [1] is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Useencoding="unicode"
to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either"xml"
,"html"
or"text"
(default is"xml"
). short_empty_elements has the same meaning as inElementTree.write()
. Returns an (optionally) encoded string containing the XML data.Nuevo en la versión 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
tostringlist
(element, encoding="us-ascii", method="xml", *, short_empty_elements=True)¶ Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an
Element
instance. encoding [1] is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Useencoding="unicode"
to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either"xml"
,"html"
or"text"
(default is"xml"
). short_empty_elements has the same meaning as inElementTree.write()
. Returns a list of (optionally) encoded strings containing the XML data. It does not guarantee any specific sequence, except thatb"".join(tostringlist(element)) == tostring(element)
.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
Nuevo en la versión 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
XML
(text, parser=None)¶ Parses an XML section from a string constant. This function can be used to embed «XML literals» in Python code. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard
XMLParser
parser is used. Returns anElement
instance.
-
xml.etree.ElementTree.
XMLID
(text, parser=None)¶ Parses an XML section from a string constant, and also returns a dictionary which maps from element id:s to elements. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard
XMLParser
parser is used. Returns a tuple containing anElement
instance and a dictionary.
20.5.3.2. Element Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
Element
(tag, attrib={}, **extra)¶ Element class. This class defines the Element interface, and provides a reference implementation of this interface.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. tag is the element name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments.
-
tag
¶ A string identifying what kind of data this element represents (the element type, in other words).
-
text
¶ -
tail
¶ These attributes can be used to hold additional data associated with the element. Their values are usually strings but may be any application-specific object. If the element is created from an XML file, the text attribute holds either the text between the element’s start tag and its first child or end tag, or
None
, and the tail attribute holds either the text between the element’s end tag and the next tag, orNone
. For the XML data<a><b>1<c>2<d/>3</c></b>4</a>
the a element has
None
for both text and tail attributes, the b element has text"1"
and tail"4"
, the c element has text"2"
and tailNone
, and the d element has textNone
and tail"3"
.To collect the inner text of an element, see
itertext()
, for example"".join(element.itertext())
.Applications may store arbitrary objects in these attributes.
-
attrib
¶ A dictionary containing the element’s attributes. Note that while the attrib value is always a real mutable Python dictionary, an ElementTree implementation may choose to use another internal representation, and create the dictionary only if someone asks for it. To take advantage of such implementations, use the dictionary methods below whenever possible.
The following dictionary-like methods work on the element attributes.
-
clear
()¶ Resets an element. This function removes all subelements, clears all attributes, and sets the text and tail attributes to
None
.
-
get
(key, default=None)¶ Gets the element attribute named key.
Returns the attribute value, or default if the attribute was not found.
-
items
()¶ Returns the element attributes as a sequence of (name, value) pairs. The attributes are returned in an arbitrary order.
-
keys
()¶ Returns the elements attribute names as a list. The names are returned in an arbitrary order.
-
set
(key, value)¶ Set the attribute key on the element to value.
The following methods work on the element’s children (subelements).
-
append
(subelement)¶ Adds the element subelement to the end of this element’s internal list of subelements. Raises
TypeError
if subelement is not anElement
.
-
extend
(subelements)¶ Appends subelements from a sequence object with zero or more elements. Raises
TypeError
if a subelement is not anElement
.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
find
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Finds the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns an element instance or
None
. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
-
findall
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns a list containing all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
-
findtext
(match, default=None, namespaces=None)¶ Finds text for the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns the text content of the first matching element, or default if no element was found. Note that if the matching element has no text content an empty string is returned. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
-
getchildren
()¶ Obsoleto desde la versión 3.2: Use
list(elem)
or iteration.
-
getiterator
(tag=None)¶ Obsoleto desde la versión 3.2: Use method
Element.iter()
instead.
-
insert
(index, subelement)¶ Inserts subelement at the given position in this element. Raises
TypeError
if subelement is not anElement
.
-
iter
(tag=None)¶ Creates a tree iterator with the current element as the root. The iterator iterates over this element and all elements below it, in document (depth first) order. If tag is not
None
or'*'
, only elements whose tag equals tag are returned from the iterator. If the tree structure is modified during iteration, the result is undefined.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
iterfind
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns an iterable yielding all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
itertext
()¶ Creates a text iterator. The iterator loops over this element and all subelements, in document order, and returns all inner text.
Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
makeelement
(tag, attrib)¶ Creates a new element object of the same type as this element. Do not call this method, use the
SubElement()
factory function instead.
-
remove
(subelement)¶ Removes subelement from the element. Unlike the find* methods this method compares elements based on the instance identity, not on tag value or contents.
Element
objects also support the following sequence type methods for working with subelements:__delitem__()
,__getitem__()
,__setitem__()
,__len__()
.Caution: Elements with no subelements will test as
False
. This behavior will change in future versions. Use specificlen(elem)
orelem is None
test instead.element = root.find('foo') if not element: # careful! print("element not found, or element has no subelements") if element is None: print("element not found")
-
20.5.3.3. ElementTree Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
ElementTree
(element=None, file=None)¶ ElementTree wrapper class. This class represents an entire element hierarchy, and adds some extra support for serialization to and from standard XML.
element is the root element. The tree is initialized with the contents of the XML file if given.
-
_setroot
(element)¶ Replaces the root element for this tree. This discards the current contents of the tree, and replaces it with the given element. Use with care. element is an element instance.
-
find
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Same as
Element.find()
, starting at the root of the tree.
-
findall
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Same as
Element.findall()
, starting at the root of the tree.
-
findtext
(match, default=None, namespaces=None)¶ Same as
Element.findtext()
, starting at the root of the tree.
-
getiterator
(tag=None)¶ Obsoleto desde la versión 3.2: Use method
ElementTree.iter()
instead.
-
getroot
()¶ Returns the root element for this tree.
-
iter
(tag=None)¶ Creates and returns a tree iterator for the root element. The iterator loops over all elements in this tree, in section order. tag is the tag to look for (default is to return all elements).
-
iterfind
(match, namespaces=None)¶ Same as
Element.iterfind()
, starting at the root of the tree.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
parse
(source, parser=None)¶ Loads an external XML section into this element tree. source is a file name or file object. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard
XMLParser
parser is used. Returns the section root element.
-
write
(file, encoding="us-ascii", xml_declaration=None, default_namespace=None, method="xml", *, short_empty_elements=True)¶ Writes the element tree to a file, as XML. file is a file name, or a file object opened for writing. encoding [1] is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). xml_declaration controls if an XML declaration should be added to the file. Use
False
for never,True
for always,None
for only if not US-ASCII or UTF-8 or Unicode (default isNone
). default_namespace sets the default XML namespace (for «xmlns»). method is either"xml"
,"html"
or"text"
(default is"xml"
). The keyword-only short_empty_elements parameter controls the formatting of elements that contain no content. IfTrue
(the default), they are emitted as a single self-closed tag, otherwise they are emitted as a pair of start/end tags.The output is either a string (
str
) or binary (bytes
). This is controlled by the encoding argument. If encoding is"unicode"
, the output is a string; otherwise, it’s binary. Note that this may conflict with the type of file if it’s an open file object; make sure you do not try to write a string to a binary stream and vice versa.Nuevo en la versión 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
-
This is the XML file that is going to be manipulated:
<html>
<head>
<title>Example page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Moved to <a href="http://example.org/">example.org</a>
or <a href="http://example.com/">example.com</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>
Example of changing the attribute «target» of every link in first paragraph:
>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import ElementTree
>>> tree = ElementTree()
>>> tree.parse("index.xhtml")
<Element 'html' at 0xb77e6fac>
>>> p = tree.find("body/p") # Finds first occurrence of tag p in body
>>> p
<Element 'p' at 0xb77ec26c>
>>> links = list(p.iter("a")) # Returns list of all links
>>> links
[<Element 'a' at 0xb77ec2ac>, <Element 'a' at 0xb77ec1cc>]
>>> for i in links: # Iterates through all found links
... i.attrib["target"] = "blank"
>>> tree.write("output.xhtml")
20.5.3.4. QName Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
QName
(text_or_uri, tag=None)¶ QName wrapper. This can be used to wrap a QName attribute value, in order to get proper namespace handling on output. text_or_uri is a string containing the QName value, in the form {uri}local, or, if the tag argument is given, the URI part of a QName. If tag is given, the first argument is interpreted as a URI, and this argument is interpreted as a local name.
QName
instances are opaque.
20.5.3.5. TreeBuilder Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
TreeBuilder
(element_factory=None)¶ Generic element structure builder. This builder converts a sequence of start, data, and end method calls to a well-formed element structure. You can use this class to build an element structure using a custom XML parser, or a parser for some other XML-like format. element_factory, when given, must be a callable accepting two positional arguments: a tag and a dict of attributes. It is expected to return a new element instance.
-
close
()¶ Flushes the builder buffers, and returns the toplevel document element. Returns an
Element
instance.
-
data
(data)¶ Adds text to the current element. data is a string. This should be either a bytestring, or a Unicode string.
-
end
(tag)¶ Closes the current element. tag is the element name. Returns the closed element.
-
start
(tag, attrs)¶ Opens a new element. tag is the element name. attrs is a dictionary containing element attributes. Returns the opened element.
In addition, a custom
TreeBuilder
object can provide the following method:-
doctype
(name, pubid, system)¶ Handles a doctype declaration. name is the doctype name. pubid is the public identifier. system is the system identifier. This method does not exist on the default
TreeBuilder
class.Nuevo en la versión 3.2.
-
20.5.3.6. XMLParser Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
XMLParser
(html=0, target=None, encoding=None)¶ This class is the low-level building block of the module. It uses
xml.parsers.expat
for efficient, event-based parsing of XML. It can be fed XML data incrementally with thefeed()
method, and parsing events are translated to a push API - by invoking callbacks on the target object. If target is omitted, the standardTreeBuilder
is used. The html argument was historically used for backwards compatibility and is now deprecated. If encoding [1] is given, the value overrides the encoding specified in the XML file.Obsoleto desde la versión 3.4: The html argument. The remaining arguments should be passed via keyword to prepare for the removal of the html argument.
-
close
()¶ Finishes feeding data to the parser. Returns the result of calling the
close()
method of the target passed during construction; by default, this is the toplevel document element.
-
doctype
(name, pubid, system)¶ Obsoleto desde la versión 3.2: Define the
TreeBuilder.doctype()
method on a custom TreeBuilder target.
-
feed
(data)¶ Feeds data to the parser. data is encoded data.
XMLParser.feed()
calls target’sstart(tag, attrs_dict)
method for each opening tag, itsend(tag)
method for each closing tag, and data is processed by methoddata(data)
.XMLParser.close()
calls target’s methodclose()
.XMLParser
can be used not only for building a tree structure. This is an example of counting the maximum depth of an XML file:>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import XMLParser >>> class MaxDepth: # The target object of the parser ... maxDepth = 0 ... depth = 0 ... def start(self, tag, attrib): # Called for each opening tag. ... self.depth += 1 ... if self.depth > self.maxDepth: ... self.maxDepth = self.depth ... def end(self, tag): # Called for each closing tag. ... self.depth -= 1 ... def data(self, data): ... pass # We do not need to do anything with data. ... def close(self): # Called when all data has been parsed. ... return self.maxDepth ... >>> target = MaxDepth() >>> parser = XMLParser(target=target) >>> exampleXml = """ ... <a> ... <b> ... </b> ... <b> ... <c> ... <d> ... </d> ... </c> ... </b> ... </a>""" >>> parser.feed(exampleXml) >>> parser.close() 4
-
20.5.3.7. XMLPullParser Objects¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
XMLPullParser
(events=None)¶ A pull parser suitable for non-blocking applications. Its input-side API is similar to that of
XMLParser
, but instead of pushing calls to a callback target,XMLPullParser
collects an internal list of parsing events and lets the user read from it. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings"start"
,"end"
,"start-ns"
and"end-ns"
(the «ns» events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only"end"
events are reported.-
feed
(data)¶ Feed the given bytes data to the parser.
-
close
()¶ Signal the parser that the data stream is terminated. Unlike
XMLParser.close()
, this method always returnsNone
. Any events not yet retrieved when the parser is closed can still be read withread_events()
.
-
read_events
()¶ Return an iterator over the events which have been encountered in the data fed to the parser. The iterator yields
(event, elem)
pairs, where event is a string representing the type of event (e.g."end"
) and elem is the encounteredElement
object.Events provided in a previous call to
read_events()
will not be yielded again. Events are consumed from the internal queue only when they are retrieved from the iterator, so multiple readers iterating in parallel over iterators obtained fromread_events()
will have unpredictable results.
Nota
XMLPullParser
only guarantees that it has seen the «>» character of a starting tag when it emits a «start» event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.If you need a fully populated element, look for «end» events instead.
Nuevo en la versión 3.4.
-
20.5.3.8. Exceptions¶
-
class
xml.etree.ElementTree.
ParseError
¶ XML parse error, raised by the various parsing methods in this module when parsing fails. The string representation of an instance of this exception will contain a user-friendly error message. In addition, it will have the following attributes available:
-
code
¶ A numeric error code from the expat parser. See the documentation of
xml.parsers.expat
for the list of error codes and their meanings.
-
position
¶ A tuple of line, column numbers, specifying where the error occurred.
-
Footnotes
[1] | (1, 2, 3, 4) The encoding string included in XML output should conform to the appropriate standards. For example, «UTF-8» is valid, but «UTF8» is not. See https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml11-20060816/#NT-EncodingDecl and https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml. |