Extract value from tag python

Question

How can i extract the value of name4 from the following? the example provided is a sample ? how can i do the same with xml.parsers.expat, i am using python 2.4 that doesnt have xml.etree

<test name1="" name2="" name3="0.0.0.0" name4="Linux">
</test>

Answer 1

using lxml.html

import lxml.html as lh

doc=lh.fromstring('<test name1="" name2="" name3="0.0.0.0" name4="Linux"></test>')

doc.xpath('.//@name4')
Out[298]: ['Linux']

Note1: regex can be used for this simple example but using regex to parse xml/html is a bad practice and you should not get into a habit of doing so.

Note2: if you are to into installing lxml, xml.etree.ElementTree is as good (lightweight?) alternative that comes with python, especially for simpler tasks.

Answer 2

Sometimes it's really easy to use BeautifulSoup

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as bs

your_string = """<test name1="" name2="" name3="0.0.0.0" name4="Linux"></test>"""

soup = bs(your_string)
res = soup.findAll('test')
for i in res:
    print i.get('name4')

Also you can find more examples on documentation page

Update how to change name of attribute and print whole xml:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as bs

your_string = """<test name1="" name2="" name3="0.0.0.0" name4="Linux"></test>"""

soup = bs(your_string)
s = soup.test
s['name4'] = 'Ubuntu'
print soup