How to get the root node of an xml file in Python?

Question

Basically I am using:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

path = 'C:\cool.xml'
et = ET.parse ( path )

But I am not sure how to get the root from et?

Answer 1

You probably want:

et.getroot()

Have a look at the official docs for ElementTree from the effbot site. Note that Python 2.5 (the first version of Python to include ElementTree out of the box) uses ElementTree 1.2, not the more recent 1.3. There aren't many differences, but just FYI in case.

Answer 2

root = et.getroot()

I would recommend using lxml.etree instead of xml.etree.ElementTree, as lxml is faster and the interface is the same.