How to extract xml attribute using Python ElementTree

For:

<foo> <bar key="value">text</bar> </foo> 

How do I get "value"?

xml.findtext("./bar[@key]") 

Throws an error.

5 Answers

This will find the first instance of an element named bar and return the value of the attribute key.

In [52]: import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET In [53]: xml=ET.fromstring(contents) In [54]: xml.find('./bar').attrib['key'] Out[54]: 'value' 

Getting child tag's attribute value in a XML using ElementTree

Parse the XML file and get the root tag and then using [0] will give us first child tag. Similarly [1], [2] gives us subsequent child tags. After getting child tag use .attrib[attribute_name] to get value of that attribute.

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET >>> xmlstr = '<foo><bar key="value">text</bar></foo>' >>> root = ET.fromstring(xmlstr) >>> root.tag 'foo' >>> root[0].tag 'bar' >>> root[0].attrib['key'] 'value' 

If the xml content is in file. You should do below task to get the root.

>>> tree = ET.parse('file.xml') >>> root = tree.getroot() 

Your expression:

./bar[@key]

It means: bar children having key attribute

If you want to select the attribute, use this relative expression:

bar/@key 

It means: the key attribute of bar children

Of course, you need to consider to use a fully compliant XPath engine like lxml.

By following method you can get all attributes from xml (in Dictionary)

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree xmlString= "<feed xml:lang='en'><title>World Wide Web</title><subtitle lang='en'>Programming challenges</subtitle><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='" xml= etree.fromstring(xmlString) def get_attr(xml): attributes = [] for child in (xml): if len(child.attrib)!= 0: attributes.append(child.attrib) get_attr(child) return attributes attributes = get_attr(xml) print(attributes) 

dipenparmar12 function will not return the childrens child attributes. Because the function is recursive the attributes list will be set to a empty list for each call. This function will has return the childrens child.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree xml= etree.fromstring(xmlString) def get_attr(xml, attributes): for child in (xml): if len(child.attrib)!= 0: attributes.append(child.attrib) get_attr(child,attributes) return attributes attributes = get_attr(xml,[]) print(attributes)