parsing an xml file for unknown elements using python ElementTree

Question

I wish to extract all the tag names and their corresponding data from a multi-purpose xml file. Then save that information into a python dictionary (e.g tag = key, data = value). The catch being the tags names and values are unknown and of unknown quantity.

    <some_root_name>
        <tag_x>bubbles</tag_x>
        <tag_y>car</tag_y>
        <tag...>42</tag...>
    </some_root_name>

I'm using ElementTree and can successfully extract the root tag and can extract values by referencing the tag names, but haven't been able to find a way to simply iterate over the tags and data without referencing a tag name.

Any help would be great.

Thank you.

Answer 1

from lxml import etree as ET

xmlString = """
    <some_root_name>
        <tag_x>bubbles</tag_x>
        <tag_y>car</tag_y>
        <tag...>42</tag...>
    </some_root_name> """

document = ET.fromstring(xmlString)
for elementtag in document.getiterator():
   print "elementtag name:", elementtag.tag

EDIT: To read from file instead of from string

document = ET.parse("myxmlfile.xml")