change xml element text using xml.etree.ElementTree

Question

Given a parsed xml string:

tree = xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(xml_string)

How would you change an element's text from 'hats':

>>> tree.find("path/to/element").text
>>> 'hats'

to 'cats'?

Answer 1

Simply set the .text attribute value:

In [1]: import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

In [2]: root = ET.fromstring("<root><elm>hats</elm></root>")

In [3]: elm = root.find(".//elm")

In [4]: elm.text
Out[4]: 'hats'

In [5]: elm.text = 'cats'

In [6]: ET.tostring(root)
Out[6]: '<root><elm>cats</elm></root>'

Answer 2

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et # import the elementtree module
root = et.fromstring(command_request) # fromString parses xml from string to an element, command request can be xml request string
root.find("cat").text = "dog" #find the element tag as cat and replace it with the string to be replaced.
et.tostring(root) # converts the element to a string

cheers