Get all xml attribute values in python3 using ElementTree

Question

I have the following xml file

<?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>

I want to write python 3 code using ElementTree to get all country names. So the end result should be a dict or array of

['Liechtenstein','Singapore','Panama']

I am trying to do this using Xpath but getting nowhere. So my code is as follows

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(xmlfile)
root = tree.getroot()

names = root.findall("./country/@name")

However the above does not work as I feel my xpath is wrong.

Answer 1

Use findall() to get all of the country tags and get the name attribute from the .attrib dictionary:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

data = """your xml here"""

tree = ET.fromstring(data) 
print([el.attrib.get('name') for el in tree.findall('.//country')])

Prints ['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama'].

Note that you cannot get the attribute values using an xpath expression //country/@name since xml.etree.ElementTree provides only limited Xpath support.

---

FYI, lxml provides a more complete xpath support and therefore makes it easier to get the attribute values:

from lxml import etree as ET

data = """your xml here"""

tree = ET.fromstring(data)
print(tree.xpath('//country/@name'))

Prints ['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama'].