Why does ElementTree not delete all child nodes?

Question

I have an XML file of the form:

<PlayersList>
  <player>
    <username>Someuser</username>
    <network>Somenetwork</network>
    <country>France</country>
    <blocked>False</blocked>
    <resetDate>NA</resetDate>
    <Stat1>1665</Stat1> 
    <Stat2>-5.47</Stat2>
    <Stat3>15.07</Stat3>
    <Stat4>-16.8</Stat4>
    <Stat5>-9104.47</Stat5>
    <Stat6>25087.75</Stat6>
    <Stat7>17965.79</Stat7>
    <Stat8>2011-04-17 03:33</Stat8>
    <Stat9>28</Stat9>
    <Stat10>5.9</Stat10>
    <Stat11>283</Stat11>
    <Stat12>-33.6</Stat12>
    <Stat13>22.3</Stat13>
    <Stat14>460.4</Stat14>
    <Stat15>57.5</Stat15>
</player>
.
.
</PlayersList>

I'm trying to delete all the child nodes of player. I select the given player element I want with

e= root.findall('player')[2]

then attempt to delete all childen:

for child in e: 
    e.remove(child)

Yet only a few child nodes are removed each time that I run this, not all! Why?

I can list all child tags and their text no problem with

for child in e:
    print child.tag+':'+child.text

Answer 1

This is because you are modifying the element you are iterating on. You can store the child elements in a temporary list and iterate over that instead:

for child in list(e):
    e.remove(child)

This will remove all children.