CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlxmlelementtree
mynameisJEFF
mynameisJEFF

Reputation: 4239

Python: lxml findall returning object, not value inside element text

I have written the following python code to parse a XML file with lxml. I am confused why it is returning a memory address but not the actual output height in this case. 

import pdb
from pprint import pprint
from lxml import etree

def main():
    parser = etree.XMLParser(strip_cdata = False)
    tree = etree.parse("xml.xml", parser)
    string =  etree.tostring(tree.getroot())
    content = etree.fromstring(string)
    bodies = content.findall('Body')
    all_data = []
    for body in bodies:
        row  = {}
        height = body.findall('height')

        row['height'] = height
        all_data.append(row)
    print all_data
    pdb.set_trace()

The output that I got is: 

[{'height': [<Element height at 0x11ac80830>]}]

whereas I expect a height of 178.

The data within the xml file is:

<Bodies>
  <Body>
    <name><![CDATA[abc]]></name>
       <body_name><![CDATA[asdjakhdas da sdasda sd]]></body_name>
       <final_height><![CDATA[199]]></final_height>
       <categories><![CDATA[a / b / c]]></categories>
       <hand><![CDATA[asdkj]]></hand>
        <height>178</height>
  </Body>
<Bodies>

Upvotes: 0

Views: 892

Answers (1)

Charles Duffy
Charles Duffy

Reputation: 295272

If you don't want to put the height element into your variable, but instead the text field it contains:

height = body.find('height')
row['height'] = float(height.text) if height else None

Note the use of find as opposed to findall -- findall returns a list, whereas it sounds like you're expecting only a single value (and have no need to recurse).

Upvotes: 2

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