>>> from lxml import etree
If your code only uses the ElementTree API and does not rely on any
functionality that is specific to lxml.etree, you can also use the following
import chain as a fall-back to ElementTree in the Python standard library:
try:
    from lxml import etree
    print("running with lxml.etree")
except ImportError:
    import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
    print("running with Python's xml.etree.ElementTree")
To aid in writing portable code, this tutorial makes it clear in the examples
which part of the presented API is an extension of lxml.etree over the
original ElementTree API.
The Element class
An Element is the main container object for the ElementTree API.  Most of
the XML tree functionality is accessed through this class.  Elements are
easily created through the Element factory:
>>> root = etree.Element("root")
The XML tag name of elements is accessed through the tag property:
>>> print(root.tag)
Elements are organised in an XML tree structure.  To create child elements and
add them to a parent element, you can use the append() method:
>>> root.append( etree.Element("child1") )
However, this is so common that there is a shorter and much more efficient way
to do this: the SubElement factory.  It accepts the same arguments as the
Element factory, but additionally requires the parent as first argument:
>>> child2 = etree.SubElement(root, "child2")
>>> child3 = etree.SubElement(root, "child3")
To see that this is really XML, you can serialise the tree you have created:
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><child1/><child2/><child3/></root>'
We'll create a little helper function to pretty-print the XML for us:
>>> def prettyprint(element, **kwargs):
...     xml = etree.tostring(element, pretty_print=True, **kwargs)
...     print(xml.decode(), end='')
>>> prettyprint(root)
  <child1/>
  <child2/>
  <child3/>
</root>
Elements are lists
To make the access to these subelements easy and straight forward,
elements mimic the behaviour of normal Python lists as closely as
possible:
>>> child = root[0]
>>> print(child.tag)
child1
>>> print(len(root))
>>> root.index(root[1])  # lxml.etree only!
>>> children = list(root)
>>> for child in root:
...     print(child.tag)
child1
child2
child3
>>> root.insert(0, etree.Element("child0"))
>>> start = root[:1]
>>> end   = root[-1:]
>>> print(start[0].tag)
child0
>>> print(end[0].tag)
child3
Prior to ElementTree 1.3 and lxml 2.0, you could also check the truth value of
an Element to see if it has children, i.e. if the list of children is empty:
if root:   # this no longer works!
    print("The root element has children")
This is no longer supported as people tend to expect that a "something"
evaluates to True and expect Elements to be "something", may they have
children or not.  So, many users find it surprising that any Element
would evaluate to False in an if-statement like the above.  Instead,
use len(element), which is both more explicit and less error prone.
>>> print(etree.iselement(root))  # test if it's some kind of Element
>>> if len(root):                 # test if it has children
...     print("The root element has children")
The root element has children
There is another important case where the behaviour of Elements in lxml
(in 2.0 and later) deviates from that of lists and from that of the
original ElementTree (prior to version 1.3 or Python 2.7/3.2):
>>> for child in root:
...     print(child.tag)
child0
child1
child2
child3
>>> root[0] = root[-1]  # this moves the element in lxml.etree!
>>> for child in root:
...     print(child.tag)
child3
child1
child2
In this example, the last element is moved to a different position,
instead of being copied, i.e. it is automatically removed from its
previous position when it is put in a different place.  In lists,
objects can appear in multiple positions at the same time, and the
above assignment would just copy the item reference into the first
position, so that both contain the exact same item:
>>> l = [0, 1, 2, 3]
>>> l[0] = l[-1]
[3, 1, 2, 3]
Note that in the original ElementTree, a single Element object can sit
in any number of places in any number of trees, which allows for the same
copy operation as with lists.  The obvious drawback is that modifications
to such an Element will apply to all places where it appears in a tree,
which may or may not be intended.
The upside of this difference is that an Element in lxml.etree always
has exactly one parent, which can be queried through the getparent()
method.  This is not supported in the original ElementTree.
>>> root is root[0].getparent()  # lxml.etree only!
If you want to copy an element to a different position in lxml.etree,
consider creating an independent deep copy using the copy module
from Python's standard library:
>>> from copy import deepcopy
>>> element = etree.Element("neu")
>>> element.append( deepcopy(root[1]) )
>>> print(element[0].tag)
child1
>>> print([ c.tag for c in root ])
['child3', 'child1', 'child2']
The siblings (or neighbours) of an element are accessed as next and previous
elements:
>>> root[0] is root[1].getprevious() # lxml.etree only!
>>> root[1] is root[0].getnext() # lxml.etree only!
Elements carry attributes as a dict
XML elements support attributes.  You can create them directly in the Element
factory:




    

>>> root = etree.Element("root", interesting="totally")
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root interesting="totally"/>'
Attributes are just unordered name-value pairs, so a very convenient way
of dealing with them is through the dictionary-like interface of Elements:
>>> print(root.get("interesting"))
totally
>>> print(root.get("hello"))
>>> root.set("hello", "Huhu")
>>> print(root.get("hello"))
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root interesting="totally" hello="Huhu"/>'
>>> sorted(root.keys())
['hello', 'interesting']
>>> for name, value in sorted(root.items()):
...     print('%s = %r' % (name, value))
hello = 'Huhu'
interesting = 'totally'
For the cases where you want to do item lookup or have other reasons for
getting a 'real' dictionary-like object, e.g. for passing it around,
you can use the attrib property:
>>> attributes = root.attrib
>>> print(attributes["interesting"])
totally
>>> print(attributes.get("no-such-attribute"))
>>> attributes["hello"] = "Guten Tag"
>>> print(attributes["hello"])
Guten Tag
>>> print(root.get("hello"))
Guten Tag
Note that attrib is a dict-like object backed by the Element itself.
This means that any changes to the Element are reflected in attrib
and vice versa.  It also means that the XML tree stays alive in memory
as long as the attrib of one of its Elements is in use.  To get an
independent snapshot of the attributes that does not depend on the XML
tree, copy it into a dict:
>>> d = dict(root.attrib)
>>> sorted(d.items())
[('hello', 'Guten Tag'), ('interesting', 'totally')]
Elements contain text
Elements can contain text:
>>> root = etree.Element("root")
>>> root.text = "TEXT"
>>> print(root.text)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root>TEXT</root>'
In many XML documents (data-centric documents), this is the only place where
text can be found.  It is encapsulated by a leaf tag at the very bottom of the
tree hierarchy.
However, if XML is used for tagged text documents such as (X)HTML, text can
also appear between different elements, right in the middle of the tree:
<html><body>Hello<br/>World</body></html>
Here, the <br/> tag is surrounded by text.  This is often referred to as
document-style or mixed-content XML.  Elements support this through their
tail property.  It contains the text that directly follows the element, up
to the next element in the XML tree:
>>> html = etree.Element("html")
>>> body = etree.SubElement(html, "body")
>>> body.text = "TEXT"
>>> etree.tostring(html)
b'<html><body>TEXT</body></html>'
>>> br = etree.SubElement(body, "br")
>>> etree.tostring(html)
b'<html><body>TEXT<br/></body></html>'
>>> br.tail = "TAIL"
>>> etree.tostring(html)
b'<html><body>TEXT<br/>TAIL</body></html>'
The two properties .text and .tail are enough to represent any
text content in an XML document.  This way, the ElementTree API does
not require any special text nodes in addition to the Element
class, that tend to get in the way fairly often (as you might know
from classic DOM APIs).
However, there are cases where the tail text also gets in the way.
For example, when you serialise an Element from within the tree, you
do not always want its tail text in the result (although you would
still want the tail text of its children).  For this purpose, the
tostring() function accepts the keyword argument with_tail:
>>> etree.tostring(br)
b'<br/>TAIL'
>>> etree.tostring(br, with_tail=False) # lxml.etree only!
b'<br/>'
If you want to read only the text, i.e. without any intermediate
tags, you have to recursively concatenate all text and tail
attributes in the correct order.  Again, the tostring() function
comes to the rescue, this time using the method keyword:
>>> etree.tostring(html, method="text")
b'TEXTTAIL'
Using XPath to find text
Another way to extract the text content of a tree is XPath, which
also allows you to extract the separate text chunks into a list:
>>> print(html.xpath("string()")) # lxml.etree only!
TEXTTAIL
>>> print(html.xpath("//text()")) # lxml.etree only!
['TEXT', 'TAIL']
If you want to use this more often, you can wrap it in a function:
>>> build_text_list = etree.XPath("//text()") # lxml.etree only!
>>> print(build_text_list(html))
['TEXT', 'TAIL']
Note that a string result returned by XPath is a special 'smart'
object that knows about its origins.  You can ask it where it came
from through its getparent() method, just as you would with
Elements:
>>> texts = build_text_list(html)
>>> print(texts[0])
>>> parent = texts[0].getparent()
>>> print(parent.tag)
>>> print(texts[1])
>>> print(texts[1].getparent().tag)
You can also find out if it's normal text content or tail text:
>>> print(texts[0].is_text)
>>> print(texts[1].is_text)
False
>>> print(texts[1].is_tail)
While this works for the results of the text() function, lxml will
not tell you the origin of a string value that was constructed by the
XPath functions string() or concat():
>>> stringify = etree.XPath("string()")
>>> print(stringify(html))
TEXTTAIL
>>> print(stringify(html).getparent())
Tree iteration
For problems like the above, where you want to recursively traverse the tree
and do something with its elements, tree iteration is a very convenient
solution.  Elements provide a tree iterator for this purpose.  It yields
elements in document order, i.e. in the order their tags would appear if you
serialised the tree to XML:
>>> root = etree.Element("root")
>>> etree.SubElement(root, "child").text = "Child 1"
>>> etree.SubElement(root, "child").text = "Child 2"
>>> etree.SubElement(root, "another").text = "Child 3"
>>> prettyprint(root)
  <child>Child 1</child>
  <child>Child 2</child>
  <another>Child 3</another>
</root>
>>> for element in root.iter():
...     print(f"{element.tag} - {element.text}")
root - None
child - Child 1
child - Child 2
another - Child 3
If you know you are only interested in a single tag, you can pass its name to
iter() to have it filter for you.  Starting with lxml 3.0, you can also
pass more than one tag to intercept on multiple tags during iteration.




    

>>> for element in root.iter("child"):
...     print(f"{element.tag} - {element.text}")
child - Child 1
child - Child 2
>>> for element in root.iter("another", "child"):
...     print(f"{element.tag} - {element.text}")
child - Child 1
child - Child 2
another - Child 3
By default, iteration yields all nodes in the tree, including
ProcessingInstructions, Comments and Entity instances.  If you want to
make sure only Element objects are returned, you can pass the
Element factory as tag parameter:
>>> root.append(etree.Entity("#234"))
>>> root.append(etree.Comment("some comment"))
>>> for element in root.iter():
...     if isinstance(element.tag, str):
...         print(f"{element.tag} - {element.text}")
...     else:
...         print(f"SPECIAL: {element} - {element.text}")
root - None
child - Child 1
child - Child 2
another - Child 3
SPECIAL: &#234; - &#234;
SPECIAL: <!--some comment--> - some comment
>>> for element in root.iter(tag=etree.Element):
...     print(f"{element.tag} - {element.text}")
root - None
child - Child 1
child - Child 2
another - Child 3
>>> for element in root.iter(tag=etree.Entity):
...     print(element.text)
&#234;
Note that passing a wildcard "*" tag name will also yield all
Element nodes (and only elements).
In lxml.etree, elements provide further iterators for all directions in the
tree: children, parents (or rather ancestors) and siblings.
Serialisation
Serialisation commonly uses the tostring() function that returns a
string, or the ElementTree.write() method that writes to a file, a
file-like object, or a URL (via FTP PUT or HTTP POST).  Both calls accept
the same keyword arguments like pretty_print for formatted output
or encoding to select a specific output encoding other than plain
ASCII:
>>> root = etree.XML('<root><a><b/></a></root>')
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><a><b/></a></root>'
>>> xml_string = etree.tostring(root, xml_declaration=True)
>>> print(xml_string.decode(), end='')
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ASCII'?>
<root><a><b/></a></root>
>>> latin1_bytesstring = etree.tostring(root, encoding='iso8859-1')
>>> print(latin1_bytesstring.decode('iso8859-1'), end='')
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='iso8859-1'?>
<root><a><b/></a></root>
>>> print(etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True).decode(), end='')
</root>
Note that pretty printing appends a newline at the end.
We therefore use the end='' option here to prevent the print()
function from adding another line break.
For more fine-grained control over the pretty-printing, you can add
whitespace indentation to the tree before serialising it, using the
indent() function (added in lxml 4.5):
>>> root = etree.XML('<root><a><b/>\n</a></root>')
>>> print(etree.tostring(root).decode())
<root><a><b/>
</a></root>
>>> etree.indent(root)
>>> print(etree.tostring(root).decode())
</root>
>>> root.text
'\n  '
>>> root[0].text
'\n    '
>>> etree.indent(root, space="    ")
>>> print(etree.tostring(root).decode())
</root>
>>> etree.indent(root, space="\t")
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root>\n\t<a>\n\t\t<b/>\n\t</a>\n</root>'
In lxml 2.0 and later, as well as in xml.etree, the serialisation
functions can do more than XML serialisation.  You can serialise to
HTML or extract the text content by passing the method keyword:
>>> root = etree.XML(
...    '<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>')
>>> etree.tostring(root)  # default: method = 'xml'
b'<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>'
>>> etree.tostring(root, method='xml')  # same as above
b'<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>'
>>> etree.tostring(root, method='html')
b'<html><head></head><body><p>Hello<br>World</p></body></html>'
>>> prettyprint(root, method='html')
<head></head>
<body><p>Hello<br>World</p></body>
</html>
>>> etree.tostring(root, method='text')
b'HelloWorld'
As for XML serialisation, the default encoding for plain text
serialisation is ASCII:
>>> br = next(root.iter('br'))  # get first result of iteration
>>> br.tail = 'Wörld'
>>> etree.tostring(root, method='text')  # doctest: +ELLIPSIS
Traceback (most recent call last):
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xf6' ...
>>> etree.tostring(root, method='text', encoding="UTF-8")
b'HelloW\xc3\xb6rld'
Here, serialising to a Python text string instead of a byte string
might become handy.  Just pass the name 'unicode' as encoding:




    

>>> etree.tostring(root, encoding='unicode', method='text')
'HelloWörld'
>>> etree.tostring(root, encoding='unicode')
'<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>Wörld</p></body></html>'
The W3C has a good article about the Unicode character set and character encodings
<http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/>`_.
The ElementTree class
An ElementTree is mainly a document wrapper around a tree with a
root node.  It provides a couple of methods for serialisation and
general document handling.
>>> root = etree.XML('''\
... <?xml version="1.0"?>
... <!DOCTYPE root SYSTEM "test" [ <!ENTITY tasty "parsnips"> ]>
... <root>
...   <a>&tasty;</a>
... </root>
... ''')
>>> tree = etree.ElementTree(root)
>>> print(tree.docinfo.xml_version)
>>> print(tree.docinfo.doctype)
<!DOCTYPE root SYSTEM "test">
>>> tree.docinfo.public_id = '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN'
>>> tree.docinfo.system_url = 'file://local.dtd'
>>> print(tree.docinfo.doctype)
<!DOCTYPE root PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "file://local.dtd">
An ElementTree is also what you get back when you call the
parse() function to parse files or file-like objects (see the
parsing section below).
One of the important differences is that the ElementTree class
serialises as a complete document, as opposed to a single Element.
This includes top-level processing instructions and comments, as well
as a DOCTYPE and other DTD content in the document:
>>> prettyprint(tree)  # lxml 1.3.4 and later
<!DOCTYPE root PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "file://local.dtd" [
<!ENTITY tasty "parsnips">
  <a>parsnips</a>
</root>
In the original xml.etree.ElementTree implementation and in lxml
up to 1.3.3, the output looks the same as when serialising only
the root Element:
>>> prettyprint(tree.getroot())
  <a>parsnips</a>
</root>
This serialisation behaviour has changed in lxml 1.3.4.  Before,
the tree was serialised without DTD content, which made lxml
lose DTD information in an input-output cycle.
Parsing from strings and files
lxml.etree supports parsing XML in a number of ways and from all
important sources, namely strings, files, URLs (http/ftp) and
file-like objects.  The main parse functions are fromstring() and
parse(), both called with the source as first argument.  By
default, they use the standard parser, but you can always pass a
different parser as second argument.
The fromstring() function
The fromstring() function is the easiest way to parse a string:
>>> some_xml_data = "<root>data</root>"
>>> root = etree.fromstring(some_xml_data)
>>> print(root.tag)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root>data</root>'
The XML() function
The XML() function behaves like the fromstring() function, but is
commonly used to write XML literals right into the source:
>>> root = etree.XML("<root>data</root>")
>>> print(root.tag)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root>data</root>'
There is also a corresponding function HTML() for HTML literals.
>>> root = etree.HTML("<p>data</p>")
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<html><body><p>data</p></body></html>'
The parse() function
The parse() function is used to parse from files and file-like objects.
As an example of such a file-like object, the following code uses the
BytesIO class for reading from a string instead of an external file.
However, in real life, you would obviously avoid doing this and use the
string parsing functions like fromstring() above.
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> some_file_or_file_like_object = BytesIO(b"<root>data</root>")
>>> tree = etree.parse(some_file_or_file_like_object)
>>> etree.tostring(tree)
b'<root>data</root>'
Note that parse() returns an ElementTree object, not an Element object as
the string parser functions:
>>> root = tree.getroot()
>>> print(root.tag)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root>data</root>'
The reasoning behind this difference is that parse() returns a
complete document from a file, while the string parsing functions are
commonly used to parse XML fragments.
The parse() function supports any of the following sources:
an open file object (make sure to open it in binary mode)
a file-like object that has a .read(byte_count) method returning
a byte string on each call
a filename string
an HTTP or FTP URL string
Note that passing a filename or URL is usually faster than passing an
open file or file-like object.  However, the HTTP/FTP client in libxml2
is rather simple, so things like HTTP authentication require a dedicated
URL request library, e.g. urllib2 or requests.  These libraries
usually provide a file-like object for the result that you can parse
from while the response is streaming in.
Parser objects
By default, lxml.etree uses a standard parser with a default setup.  If
you want to configure the parser, you can create a new instance:
>>> parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)  # lxml.etree only!
This creates a parser that removes empty text between tags while parsing,
which can reduce the size of the tree and avoid dangling tail text if you know
that whitespace-only content is not meaningful for your data.  An example:
>>> root = etree.XML("<root>  <a/>   <b>  </b>     </root>", parser)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><a/><b>  </b></root>'
Note that the whitespace content inside the <b> tag was not removed, as
content at leaf elements tends to be data content (even if blank).  You can
easily remove it in an additional step by traversing the tree:
>>> for element in root.iter("*"):
...     if element.text is not None and not element.text.strip():
...         element.text = None
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><a/><b/></root>'
See help(etree.XMLParser) to find out about the available parser options.
Incremental parsing
lxml.etree provides two ways for incremental step-by-step parsing.  One is
through file-like objects, where it calls the read() method repeatedly.
This is best used where the data arrives from a source like urllib or any
other file-like object that can provide data on request.  Note that the parser
will block and wait until data becomes available in this case:
>>> class DataSource:
...     data = [ b"<roo", b"t><", b"a/", b"><", b"/root>" ]
...     def read(self, requested_size):
...         try:
...             return self.data.pop(0)
...         except IndexError:
...             return b''
>>> tree = etree.parse(DataSource())
>>> etree.tostring(tree)
b'<root><a/></root>'
The second way is through a feed parser interface, given by the feed(data)
and close() methods:




    

>>> parser = etree.XMLParser()
>>> parser.feed("<roo")
>>> parser.feed("t><")
>>> parser.feed("a/")
>>> parser.feed("><")
>>> parser.feed("/root>")
>>> root = parser.close()
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><a/></root>'
Here, you can interrupt the parsing process at any time and continue it later
on with another call to the feed() method.  This comes in handy if you
want to avoid blocking calls to the parser, e.g. in frameworks like Twisted,
or whenever data comes in slowly or in chunks and you want to do other things
while waiting for the next chunk.
After calling the close() method (or when an exception was raised
by the parser), you can reuse the parser by calling its feed()
method again:
>>> parser.feed("<root/>")
>>> root = parser.close()
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root/>'
Event-driven parsing
Sometimes, all you need from a document is a small fraction somewhere deep
inside the tree, so parsing the whole tree into memory, traversing it and
dropping it can be too much overhead.  lxml.etree supports this use case
with two event-driven parser interfaces, one that generates parser events
while building the tree (iterparse), and one that does not build the tree
at all, and instead calls feedback methods on a target object in a SAX-like
fashion.
Here is a simple iterparse() example:
>>> some_file_like = BytesIO(b"<root><a>data</a></root>")
>>> for event, element in etree.iterparse(some_file_like):
...     print(f"{event}, {element.tag:>4}, {element.text}")
end,    a, data
end, root, None
By default, iterparse() only generates an event when it is done parsing an
element, but you can control this through the events keyword argument:
>>> some_file_like = BytesIO(b"<root><a>data</a></root>")
>>> for event, element in etree.iterparse(some_file_like,
...                                       events=("start", "end")):
...     print(f"{event:>5}, {element.tag:>4}, {element.text}")
start, root, None
start,    a, data
  end,    a, data
  end, root, None
Note that the text, tail, and children of an Element are not necessarily present
yet when receiving the start event.  Only the end event guarantees
that the Element has been parsed completely.
It also allows you to .clear() or modify the content of an Element to
save memory. So if you parse a large tree and you want to keep memory
usage small, you should clean up parts of the tree that you no longer
need. The keep_tail=True argument to .clear() makes sure that
(tail) text content that follows the current element will not be touched.
It is highly discouraged to modify any content that the parser may not
have completely read through yet.
>>> some_file_like = BytesIO(
...     b"<root><a><b>data</b></a><a><b/></a></root>")
>>> for event, element in etree.iterparse(some_file_like):
...     if element.tag == 'b':
...         print(element.text)
...     elif element.tag == 'a':
...         print("** cleaning up the subtree")
...         element.clear(keep_tail=True)
** cleaning up the subtree
** cleaning up the subtree
A very important use case for iterparse() is parsing large
generated XML files, e.g. database dumps.  Most often, these XML
formats only have one main data item element that hangs directly below
the root node and that is repeated thousands of times.  In this case,
it is best practice to let lxml.etree do the tree building and only to
intercept on exactly this one Element, using the normal tree API
for data extraction.
>>> xml_file = BytesIO(b'''\
... <root>
...   <a><b>ABC</b><c>abc</c></a>
...   <a><b>MORE DATA</b><c>more data</c></a>
...   <a><b>XYZ</b><c>xyz</c></a>
... </root>''')
>>> for _, element in etree.iterparse(xml_file, tag='a'):
...     print('%s -- %s' % (element.findtext('b'), element[1].text))
...     element.clear(keep_tail=True)
ABC -- abc
MORE DATA -- more data
XYZ -- xyz
If, for some reason, building the tree is not desired at all, the
target parser interface of lxml.etree can be used.  It creates
SAX-like events by calling the methods of a target object.  By
implementing some or all of these methods, you can control which
events are generated:
>>> class ParserTarget:
...     events = []
...     close_count = 0
...     def start(self, tag, attrib):
...         self.events.append(("start", tag, attrib))
...     def close(self):
...         events, self.events = self.events, []
...         self.close_count += 1
...         return events
>>> parser_target = ParserTarget()
>>> parser = etree.XMLParser(target=parser_target)
>>> events = etree.fromstring('<root test="true"/>', parser)
>>> print(parser_target.close_count)
>>> for event in events:
...     print(f'event: {event[0]} - tag: {event[1]}')
...     for attr, value in event[2].items():
...         print(f' * {attr} = {value}')
event: start - tag: root
 * test = true
You can reuse the parser and its target as often as you like, so you
should take care that the .close() method really resets the
target to a usable state (also in the case of an error!).
>>> events = etree.fromstring('<root test="true"/>', parser)
>>> print(parser_target.close_count)
>>> events = etree.fromstring('<root test="true"/>', parser)
>>> print(parser_target.close_count)
>>> events = etree.fromstring('<root test="true"/>', parser)
>>> print(parser_target.close_count)
>>> for event in events:
...     print(f'event: {event[0]} - tag: {event[1]}')
...     for attr, value in event[2].items():
...         print(f' * {attr} = {value}')
event: start - tag: root
 * test = true
The ElementTree API avoids
namespace prefixes
wherever possible and deploys the real namespace (the URI) instead:




    

>>> xhtml = etree.Element("{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html")
>>> body = etree.SubElement(xhtml, "{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body")
>>> body.text = "Hello World"
>>> prettyprint(xhtml)
<html:html xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <html:body>Hello World</html:body>
</html:html>
The notation that ElementTree uses was originally brought up by
James Clark.  It has the major
advantage of providing a universally qualified name for a tag, regardless
of any prefixes that may or may not have been used or defined in a document.
By moving the indirection of prefixes out of the way, it makes namespace
aware code much clearer and easier to get right.
As you can see from the example, prefixes only become important when
you serialise the result.  However, the above code looks somewhat
verbose due to the lengthy namespace names.  And retyping or copying a
string over and over again is error prone.  It is therefore common
practice to store a namespace URI in a global variable.  To adapt the
namespace prefixes for serialisation, you can also pass a mapping to
the Element factory function, e.g. to define the default namespace:
>>> XHTML_NAMESPACE = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
>>> XHTML = "{%s}" % XHTML_NAMESPACE
>>> NSMAP = {None : XHTML_NAMESPACE} # the default namespace (no prefix)
>>> xhtml = etree.Element(XHTML + "html", nsmap=NSMAP) # lxml only!
>>> body = etree.SubElement(xhtml, XHTML + "body")
>>> body.text = "Hello World"
>>> prettyprint(xhtml)
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <body>Hello World</body>
</html>
You can also use the QName helper class to build or split qualified
tag names:
>>> tag = etree.QName('http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml', 'html')
>>> print(tag.localname)
>>> print(tag.namespace)
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
>>> print(tag.text)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html
>>> tag = etree.QName('{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html')
>>> print(tag.localname)
>>> print(tag.namespace)
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
>>> root = etree.Element('{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html')
>>> tag = etree.QName(root)
>>> print(tag.localname)
>>> tag = etree.QName(root, 'script')
>>> print(tag.text)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script
>>> tag = etree.QName('{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html', 'script')
>>> print(tag.text)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}script
lxml.etree allows you to look up the current namespaces defined for a
node through the .nsmap property:
>>> xhtml.nsmap
{None: 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'}
Note, however, that this includes all prefixes known in the context of
an Element, not only those that it defines itself.
>>> root = etree.Element('root', nsmap={'a': 'http://a.b/c'})
>>> child = etree.SubElement(root, 'child',
...                          nsmap={'b': 'http://b.c/d'})
>>> len(root.nsmap)
>>> len(child.nsmap)
>>> child.nsmap['a']
'http://a.b/c'
>>> child.nsmap['b']
'http://b.c/d'
Therefore, modifying the returned dict cannot have any meaningful
impact on the Element.  Any changes to it are ignored.
Namespaces on attributes work alike, but as of version 2.3, lxml.etree
will ensure that the attribute uses a prefixed namespace
declaration.  This is because unprefixed attribute names are not
considered being in a namespace by the XML namespace specification
(section 6.2), so they may end up losing their namespace on a
serialise-parse roundtrip, even if they appear in a namespaced
element.
>>> body.set(XHTML + "bgcolor", "#CCFFAA")
>>> prettyprint(xhtml)
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <body xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" html:bgcolor="#CCFFAA">Hello World</body>
</html>
>>> print(body.get("bgcolor"))
>>> body.get(XHTML + "bgcolor")
'#CCFFAA'
You can also use XPath with fully qualified names:
>>> find_xhtml_body = etree.ETXPath(      # lxml only !
...     "//{%s}body" % XHTML_NAMESPACE)
>>> results = find_xhtml_body(xhtml)
>>> print(results[0].tag)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body
For convenience, you can use "*" wildcards in all iterators of lxml.etree,
both for tag names and namespaces:
>>> for el in xhtml.iter('*'): print(el.tag)   # any element
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body
>>> for el in xhtml.iter('{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}*'): print(el.tag)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}html
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body
>>> for el in xhtml.iter('{*}body'): print(el.tag)
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body
To look for elements that do not have a namespace, either use the
plain tag name or provide the empty namespace explicitly:
>>> [ el.tag for el in xhtml.iter('{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body') ]
['{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}body']
>>> [ el.tag for el in xhtml.iter('body') ]
>>> [ el.tag for el in xhtml.iter('{}body') ]
>>> [ el.tag for el in xhtml.iter('{}*') ]
The E-factory
The E-factory provides a simple and compact syntax for generating XML and
HTML:
>>> from lxml.builder import E
>>> def CLASS(*args):  # class is a reserved word in Python
...     return {"class":' '.join(args)}
>>> html = page = (
...   E.html(       # create an Element called "html"
...     E.head(
...       E.title("This is a sample document")
...     ),
...     E.body(
...       E.h1("Hello!", CLASS("title")),
...       E.p("This is a paragraph with ", E.b("bold"), " text in it!"),
...       E.p("This is another paragraph, with a", "\n      ",
...         E.a("link", href="http://www.python.org"), "."),
...       E.p("Here are some reserved characters: <spam&egg>."),
...       etree.XML("<p>And finally an embedded XHTML fragment.</p>"),
...     )
...   )
... )
>>> prettyprint(page)
    <title>This is a sample document</title>
  </head>
    <h1 class="title">Hello!</h1>
    <p>This is a paragraph with <b>bold</b> text in it!</p>
    <p>This is another paragraph, with a
      <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a>.</p>
    <p>Here are some reserved characters: &lt;spam&amp;egg&gt;.</p>
    <p>And finally an embedded XHTML fragment.</p>
  </body>
</html>
Element creation based on attribute access makes it easy to build up a
simple vocabulary for an XML language:
>>> from lxml.builder import ElementMaker  # lxml only !
>>> E = ElementMaker(namespace="http://my.de/fault/namespace",
...                  nsmap={'p' : "http://my.de/fault/namespace"})
>>> DOC = E.doc
>>> TITLE = E.title
>>> SECTION = E.section
>>> PAR = E.par
>>> my_doc = DOC(
...   TITLE("The dog and the hog"),
...   SECTION(
...     TITLE("The dog"),
...     PAR("Once upon a time, ..."),
...     PAR("And then ...")
...   ),
...   SECTION(
...     TITLE("The hog"),
...     PAR("Sooner or later ...")
...   )
... )
>>> prettyprint(my_doc)
<p:doc xmlns:p="http://my.de/fault/namespace">
  <p:title>The dog and the hog</p:title>
  <p:section>
    <p:title>The dog</p:title>
    <p:par>Once upon a time, ...</p:par>
    <p:par>And then ...</p:par>
  </p:section>
  <p:section>
    <p:title>The hog</p:title>
    <p:par>Sooner or later ...</p:par>
  </p:section>
</p:doc>
One such example is the module lxml.html.builder, which provides a
vocabulary for HTML.
When dealing with multiple namespaces, it is good practice to define
one ElementMaker for each namespace URI.  Again, note how the above
example predefines the tag builders in named constants.  That makes it
easy to put all tag declarations of a namespace into one Python module
and to import/use the tag name constants from there.  This avoids
pitfalls like typos or accidentally missing namespaces.
ElementPath
The ElementTree library comes with a simple XPath-like path language
called ElementPath.  The main difference is that you can use the
{namespace}tag notation in ElementPath expressions.  However,
advanced features like value comparison and functions are not
available.
In addition to a full XPath implementation, lxml.etree supports the
ElementPath language in the same way ElementTree does, even using
(almost) the same implementation.  The API provides four methods here
that you can find on Elements and ElementTrees:
iterfind() iterates over all Elements that match the path
expression
findall() returns a list of matching Elements
find() efficiently returns only the first match
findtext() returns the .text content of the first match
Here are some examples:
>>> root = etree.XML("<root><a x='123'>aText<b/><c/><b/></a></root>")
Find a child of an Element:
>>> print(root.find("b"))
>>> print(root.find("a").tag)
Find an Element anywhere in the tree:
>>> print(root.find(".//b").tag)
>>> [ b.tag for b in root.iterfind(".//b") ]
['b', 'b']
Find Elements with a certain attribute:
>>> print(root.findall(".//a[@x]")[0].tag)
>>> print(root.findall(".//a[@y]"))
In lxml 3.4, there is a new helper to generate a structural ElementPath
expression for an Element:
>>> tree = etree.ElementTree(root)
>>> a = root[0]
>>> print(tree.getelementpath(a[0]))
a/b[1]
>>> print(tree.getelementpath(a[1]))
>>> print(tree.getelementpath(a[2]))
a/b[2]
>>> tree.find(tree.getelementpath(a[2])) == a[2]
As long as the tree is not modified, this path expression represents an
identifier for a given element that can be used to find() it in the same
tree later.  Compared to XPath, ElementPath expressions have the advantage
of being self-contained even for documents that use namespaces.
The .iter() method is a special case that only finds specific tags
in the tree by their name, not based on a path.  That means that the
following commands are equivalent in the success case:
>>> print(root.find(".//b").tag)
>>> print(next(root.iterfind(".//b")).tag)
>>> print(next(root.iter("b")).tag)
Note that the .find() method simply returns None if no match is found,
whereas the other two examples would raise a StopIteration exception.