Parse XML attribute to variable with ElementTree

Question

Hello im writing a bit of code im Maya and running into some issues with ElementTree. I need help reading in this xml, or something similar. The XML is generated based on a selection, so it can change.

<root>
    <Locations>
        <1 name="CacheLocation">C:\Users\daunish\Desktop</1>
    </Locations>
    <Objects>
        <1 name="Sphere">[u'pSphere1', u'pSphere2']</1>
        <2 name="Cube">[u'pCube1']</2>
    </Objects>
</root>

I need a way of searching for a particular "name" inside "Locations", and passing the text to a variable.

I also need a way of going through each line inside of "Objects" and preforming a functions, as in a for loop.

I'm open to all suggestions, I have been going crazy trying to get this to work. If you think i should format the XML differently I'm up for that as well. Thanks in advance for the help.

AChampion · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-18 16:49:54Z

1

[Note: your XML is not well formed because you can't have tags that start with a number]
Not sure what you've tried but there are many ways to do this, here's one:

Find the first element with name=CacheLocation in Locations:

>>> filename = root.find("./Locations/*[@name='CacheLocation']").text
>>> filename
'C:\\Users\\daunish\\Desktop'

Iterating over all the elements in Objects:

>>> import ast
>>> for target in root.find("./Objects"):
...     for i in ast.literal_eval(target.text):
...         print(target.get('name'), i)
Sphere pSphere1
Sphere pSphere2
Cube pCube1

edited Sep 18, 2015 at 16:49

answered Sep 18, 2015 at 16:37

AChampion

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1 Comment

Daunish Irani Over a year ago

Awesome man! I had no idea i couldn't have tags that started with numbers. Finally things are starting to look up, really appreciate it.

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