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I need to parse a xml file to extract some data. I only need some elements with certain attributes, here's an example of document:
<root> <articles> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="info"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> </articles> </root> Here I would like to get only the article with the type "news". What's the most efficient and elegant way to do it with lxml?
I tried with the find method but it's not very nice:
from lxml import etree f = etree.parse("myfile") root = f.getroot() articles = root.getchildren()[0] article_list = articles.findall('article') for article in article_list: if "type" in article.keys(): if article.attrib['type'] == 'news': content = article.find('content') content = content.text 
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lxml. etree supports the simple path syntax of the find, findall and findtext methods on ElementTree and Element, as known from the original ElementTree library (ElementPath).
lxml. etree supports parsing XML in a number of ways and from all important sources, namely strings, files, URLs (http/ftp) and file-like objects. The main parse functions are fromstring() and parse(), both called with the source as first argument.
lxml is a Python library which allows for easy handling of XML and HTML files, and can also be used for web scraping. There are a lot of off-the-shelf XML parsers out there, but for better results, developers sometimes prefer to write their own XML and HTML parsers.
You can use xpath, e.g. root.xpath("//article[@type='news']")
This xpath expression will return a list of all <article/> elements with "type" attributes with value "news". You can then iterate over it to do what you want, or pass it wherever.
To get just the text content, you can extend the xpath like so:
root = etree.fromstring(""" <root> <articles> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="info"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> </articles> </root> """) print root.xpath("//article[@type='news']/content/text()") and this will output ['some text', 'some text']. Or if you just wanted the content elements, it would be "//article[@type='news']/content" -- and so on.
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Just for reference, you can achieve the same result with findall:
root = etree.fromstring(""" <root> <articles> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="info"> <content>some text</content> </article> <article type="news"> <content>some text</content> </article> </articles> </root> """) articles = root.find("articles") article_list = articles.findall("article[@type='news']/content") for a in article_list: print a.text If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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