13.2: Looping through Nodes

Often the XML has multiple nodes and we need to write a loop to process all of the nodes. In the following program, we loop through all of the user nodes:

Code 13.2.1 (Python)

%%python3

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

input = '''
<stuff>
    <users>
        <user x=\"2\">
            <id>001</id>
            <name>Chuck</name>
        </user>
        <user x=\"7\">
            <id>009</id>
            <name>Brent</name>
        </user>
    </users>
</stuff>'''

stuff = ET.fromstring(input)
lst = stuff.findall('users/user')
print('User count:', len(lst))

for item in lst:
    print('Name', item.find('name').text)
    print('Id', item.find('id').text)
    print('Attribute', item.get(\"x\"))

# Code: http://www.py4e.com/code3/xml2.py

The findall method retrieves a Python list of subtrees that represent the user structures in the XML tree. Then we can write a for loop that looks at each of the user nodes, and prints the name and id text elements as well as the x attribute from the user node.

User count: 2
Name Chuck
Id 001
Attribute 2
Name Brent
Id 009
Attribute 7