How to find a node from a file-like xml object in Python3?

Question

These is the content of a file-like object toc:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<ncx xmlns="http://www.daisy.org/z3986/2005/ncx/" version="2005-1" xml:lang="eng">
    <head>
    ...
    </head>
    <docTitle>
        <text>THE_TEXT_I_WANT</text>
    </docTitle>

    ...
</ncx>

My Python3 codes now:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# I get toc using open method in zipfile module
# toc : <zipfile.ZipExtFile name='toc.ncx' mode='r' compress_type=deflate>
toc_tree = ET.parse(toc)
for node in toc_tree.iter():
    print(node)
print(toc_tree.find('docTitle'))

The for loop can print out all nodes but find method returns None. findall method returns nothing either. Please anybody tell me why? Is there any better solution?

Keith Hall · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-29 10:07:12Z

1

Because there is a (default) namespace in your XML, searching for elements called docTitle will find nothing, as it is searching for un-namespaced elements called docTitle. Instead, you need to use clark notation with the full namespace URI:

toc_tree.find('{http://www.daisy.org/z3986/2005/ncx/}docTitle')

answered Jul 29, 2016 at 10:07

Keith Hall

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5 Comments

lyfeng Over a year ago

It works! Thanks. Can I use namespace= in find method?

Keith Hall Over a year ago

docs.python.org/3/library/…

lyfeng Over a year ago

How come I replace 'docTitle' with 'text', find method returns nothing again??

Keith Hall Over a year ago

because find and findall only search direct children by default. try using find('.//{http://www.daisy.org/z3986/2005/ncx/}text') as per docs.python.org/3/library/…

lyfeng Over a year ago

Thank you for your answers!

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