access ElementTree node parent node

Question

I am using the builtin Python ElementTree module. It is straightforward to access children, but what about parent or sibling nodes? - can this be done efficiently without traversing the entire tree?

Answer 1

There's no direct support in the form of a parent attribute, but you can perhaps use the patterns described here to achieve the desired effect. The following one-liner is suggested (updated from the linked-to post to Python 3.8) to create a child-to-parent mapping for a whole tree, using the method xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.iter:

parent_map = {c: p for p in tree.iter() for c in p}