CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxml
Tony
Tony

Reputation: 21

Replace text in XML on the fly using Python

I have the following XML file which is longer but I only pick out the part that I want to change. I like to change the text from 'false' to 'true' and write back to the same file name. I've searched and read a few threads and the closest I get is the code below, but it does not do as what I want.

Here is the file:

<settings>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" type="bool">false</setting>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoPicturesButton" type="bool">false</setting>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoMusicButton" type="bool">false</setting>
</settings>

The code I've tried from one of the threads:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as et
tree = et.parse('path to settings.xml')
tree.find('settings/setting id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" type="bool"').text = 'true'
tree.find('settings/setting id="HomeMenuNoPicturesButton" type="bool"').text = 'true'
tree.find('settings/setting id="HomeMenuNoMusicButton" type="bool"').text = 'true'
tree.write('path to settings.xml')

I want the file to be:

<settings>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" type="bool">true</setting>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoPicturesButton" type="bool">true</setting>
    <setting id="HomeMenuNoMusicButton" type="bool">true</setting>
</settings>

Upvotes: 2

Views: 96

Answers (2)

har07
har07

Reputation: 89285

Your selector expression isn't a valid XPath expression. Use [] for filter aka predicate and use @ for attribute, for example:

tree = et.parse('path to settings.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
xpath = 'setting[@id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" and @type="bool"]'
root.find(xpath).text = 'true'

Upvotes: 2

Zach
Zach

Reputation: 482

Instead of using: 

tree.find('settings/setting id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" type="bool"').text = 'true'

Use: 

tree.find('settings/setting id="HomeMenuNoWeatherButton" type="bool"').text.set('true')

Upvotes: -1

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