How to get ( parse ) subchild in XML from python

Question

I am new to python or coding , so please be patient with my question,

So here's my busy XML

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Total>
    <ID>999</ID>
    <Response>
        <Detail>
        <Nix>
            <Check>pass</Check>
        </Nix>  
        <MaxSegment>
            <Status>V</Status>
            <Input>
                <Name>
                    <First>jack</First>
                    <Last>smiths</Last>
                </Name>
                <Address>
                <StreetAddress1>100 rodeo dr</StreetAddress1>
                <City>long beach</City>
                <State>ca</State>
                <ZipCode>90802</ZipCode>
                </Address>
                <DriverLicense>
                    <Number>123456789</Number>
                    <State>ca</State>
                </DriverLicense>
                <Contact>
                <Email>x@me.com</Email>
                <Phones>
                    <Home>0000000000</Home>
                    <Work>1111111111</Work>
                </Phones>
                </Contact>
            </Input>
            <Type>Regular</Type>
        </MaxSegment>
        </Detail>
    </Response>
</Total>

what I am trying to do is extract these value into nice and clean table below :

Here's my code so far.. but I couldn't figure it out how to get the subchild :

   import os
os.chdir('d:/py/xml/')

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('xxml.xml')
root=tree.getroot()
x = root.tag
y = root.attrib
print(x,y)

#---PRINT ALL NODES---
for child in root:
    print(child.tag, child.attrib)

Thank you in advance !

Answer 1

You could create a dictionary that maps the column names to xpath expressions that extract corresponding values e.g.:

xpath = {
  "ID": "/Total/ID/text()",
  "Check": "/Total/Response/Detail/Nix/Check/text()", # or "//Check/text()"
}

To populate the table row:

row = {name: tree.xpath(path) for name, path in xpath.items()}

The above assumes that you use lxml that support the full xpath syntax. ElementTree supports only a subset of XPath expressions but it might be enough in your case (you could remove "text()" expression and use el.text in this case) e.g.:

xpath = {
  "ID": ".//ID",
  "Check": ".//Check",
}
row = {name: tree.findtext(path) for name, path in xpath.items()}

To print all text with corresponding tag names:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree

for _, el in etree.iterparse("xxm.xml"):
    if el.text and not el: # leaf element with text
       print el.tag, el.text

If column names differ from tag names (as in your case) then the last example is not enough to build the table.

Answer 2

This is how you could traverse the tree and print only the text nodes:

def traverse(node):
    show = True
    for c in node.getchildren():
        show = False
        traverse(c)
    if show:
        print node.tag, node.text

for you example I get the following:

traverse(root)

ID 999
Check pass
Status V
First jack
Last smiths
StreetAddress1 100 rodeo dr
City long beach
State ca
ZipCode 90802
Number 123456789
State ca
Email x@me.com
Home 0000000000
Work 1111111111
Type Regular

Instead of printing out you could store (node.tag, node.text) tuples or store {node.tag: node.text} in a dict.