CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonfindbeautifulsoupfindall
Szabolcs Barotfi
Szabolcs Barotfi

Reputation: 3

Find specific sibling of an element

I have the following structure of an XML page:

<address>
<city>Anaheim</city>
<state>California</state>
<zip>92801</zip>
<country>United States</country>
</address>

<address>
<city>Berkley</city>
<state>California</state>
<zip>94705</zip>
<country>United States</country>
</address>

I would like to get only the values of the city tags, where the zip tag value meets a condition. For example I need those city names, where the zip=92801.

Is there a simple way in python to do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 572

Answers (3)

gtlambert
gtlambert

Reputation: 11971

If you want to use Beautiful Soup instead:

my_string = '''
<root>
  <address>
    <city>Anaheim</city>
    <state>California</state>
    <zip>92801</zip>
    <country>United States</country>
  </address>
  <address>
    <city>Berkley</city>
    <state>California</state>
    <zip>94705</zip>
    <country>United States</country>
  </address>
</root>
'''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_string, 'html.parser')
desired_zips = soup.findAll('zip', text="92801")
cities = []
for zip_tag in desired_zips:
    cities.append(zip_tag.findPreviousSibling('city'))

print(cities)

Output:

[<city>Anaheim</city>]

Note: you could write this for loop into a list comprehension, but it looks clunky and unreadable.

Upvotes: 0

Lawrence Benson
Lawrence Benson

Reputation: 1406

How about you use ElementTree 

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET  
tree = ET.parse('country_data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

filtered_addresses = []
for address in root.findall('address'):
    if address.get('zip') == '92801':
        filtered_addresses.append(address)

Upvotes: 0

gtlambert
gtlambert

Reputation: 11971

This will achieve the desired results:

my_string = '''
  <root>
    <address>
      <city>Anaheim</city>
      <state>California</state>
      <zip>92801</zip>
      <country>United States</country>
    </address>
    <address>
      <city>Berkley</city>
      <state>California</state>
      <zip>94705</zip>
      <country>United States</country>
    </address>
  </root>
'''

from lxml import etree

root = etree.fromstring(my_string)
cities = root.xpath('.//zip[text()="92801"]/preceding-sibling::city')

Upvotes: 2

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