Appending to attribute values of an xml using python

Question

Example xml:

<response version-api="2.0">
  <value>
    <books>
        <book available="20" id="1" tags="">
            <title></title>
            <author id="1" tags="Joel">Manuel De Cervantes</author>
        </book>
        <book available="14" id="2" tags="Jane">
            <title>Catcher in the Rye</title>
           <author id="2" tags="">JD Salinger</author>
       </book>
       <book available="13" id="3" tags="">
           <title></title>
           <author id="3">Lewis Carroll</author>
       </book>
       <book available="5" id="4" tags="Harry">
           <title>Don</title>
           <author id="4">Manuel De Cervantes</author>
       </book>
   </books>
  </value>
</response>

I want to append a string value of my choosing to all attributes called "tags". This is whether the "tags" attribute has a value or not and also the attributes are at different levels of the xml structure. I have tried the method findall() but I keep on getting an error "IndexError: list index out of range." This is the code I have so far which is a little short but I have run out of steam for what else I need to type...

splitter = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata=False)
xmldoc = etree.parse(os.path.join(root, xml_file), splitter ).getroot()
for child in xmldoc:
    if child.tag != 'response':
        allDescendants = list(etree.findall())
        for child in allDescendants:
            if hasattr(child, 'tags'):
                child.attribute["tags"].value = "someString"

Robᵩ · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-07 17:49:59Z

1

findall() is the right API to use. Here is an example:

from lxml import etree
import os

splitter = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata=False)
xml_file = 'foo.xml'
root = '.'
xmldoc = etree.parse(os.path.join(root, xml_file), splitter ).getroot()
for element in xmldoc.findall(".//*[@tags]"):
    element.attrib["tags"] += " KILROY!"

print etree.tostring(xmldoc)

answered Oct 7, 2015 at 17:49

Robᵩ

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