Extract XML tags and preserve tags ordering and hierarchy in Python

Question

I have XML file and I want to parse only tags, but I need to preserve hierarchy and order of that tags. I use xml.etree.ElementTree to do that but I extract the only list of tags.

My XML looks like:

<Collection variable="value">
    <Genre variable="value">
        <Timestamp>2017-05-15T18:14:07-05:00</Timestamp>
        <Date>2016-12-31</Date>
        <Identifier>
          <id>123456789</id>
          <Name>
            <BusinessName>AB & co</BusinessName>
          </Name>
        </Identifier>
    </Genre>
</Collection>

and desired output should be list of tags with their parent tags

['Collection/Genre',
 'Collection/Genre/Timestamp',
 'Collection/Genre/Date',
 'Collection/Genre/Identifier/id',
 'Collection/Genre/Identifier/Name/BusinessName']

any help would be appreciate.

If you can use lxml, take a look at the getpath() method. See stackoverflow.com/a/1577495/407651. — mzjn
– mzjn, Commented Aug 30, 2019 at 14:07

James · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-31 09:27:56Z

1

Expanding on @mzjn's comment, you can use the lxml package to extract the paths from the ElementTree. Also, as a side note, the ampersand is a reserved character in XML.

from lxml import etree


x = '''<Collection variable="value">
    <Genre variable="value">
        <Timestamp>2017-05-15T18:14:07-05:00</Timestamp>
        <Date>2016-12-31</Date>
        <Identifier>
          <id>123456789</id>
          <Name>
            <BusinessName>AB and co</BusinessName>
          </Name>
        </Identifier>
    </Genre>
</Collection>'''

xml = etree.fromstring(x)
tree = xml.getroottree()
paths = [tree.getpath(d) for d in xml.iterdescendants()]

paths
# returns:
['/Collection/Genre',
 '/Collection/Genre/Timestamp',
 '/Collection/Genre/Date',
 '/Collection/Genre/Identifier',
 '/Collection/Genre/Identifier/id',
 '/Collection/Genre/Identifier/Name',
 '/Collection/Genre/Identifier/Name/BusinessName']

answered Aug 31, 2019 at 9:27

James

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1 Comment

Okroshiashvili Over a year ago

With little modifications, works perfectly! Thanks to @James

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