Accessing the values of an element while parsing XML in Python

Question

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<person>
  <first-name>First_Name</first-name>
  <last-name>Last_Name</last-name>
  <headline>Headline</headline>
  <location>
    <name>Some_city, STATE </name>
    <country>
      <code>us</code>
    </country>
  </location>
</person>

I'm trying to access First_Name, Last_Name, Headline and Some_city, STATE

So far I have:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(data)
root = tree.getroot()

for child in root:
  print child

Which prints out:

<Element 'first-name' at 0x110726b10>
<Element 'last-name' at 0x110726b50>
<Element 'headline' at 0x110726b90>
<Element 'location' at 0x110726bd0>

How can I access the value of 'first-name'?

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-15 18:01:00Z

2

Get the .text property:

for child in root:
    print child.text

answered Aug 15, 2014 at 18:01

alecxe

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5 Comments

dropWizard Over a year ago

is there a way to specifically say "Just give me 'first-name'?

alecxe Over a year ago

@MorganAllen yup, root[0].text, for example.

alecxe Over a year ago

@MorganAllen or, root.findtext('first-name').

dropWizard Over a year ago

in the instance where the name is nested in location, how would I navigate to that?

alecxe Over a year ago

@MorganAllen you can use an xpath expression: print tree.findtext('.//location/name').

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