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pythonxml
George
George

Reputation: 15571

Python xml ElementTree from a string source?

The ElementTree.parse reads from a file, how can I use this if I already have the XML data in a string?

Maybe I am missing something here, but there must be a way to use the ElementTree without writing out the string to a file and reading it again.

xml.etree.elementtree

Upvotes: 209

Views: 269952

Answers (4)

dgassaway
dgassaway

Reputation: 3713

You can parse the text as a string, which creates an Element, and create an ElementTree using that Element.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(xmlstring))

I just came across this issue and the documentation, while complete, is not very straightforward on the difference in usage between the parse() and fromstring() methods.

Upvotes: 351

handle
handle

Reputation: 6369

io.StringIO is another option for getting XML into xml.etree.ElementTree:

import io
f = io.StringIO(xmlstring)
tree = ET.parse(f)
root = tree.getroot()

Hovever, it does not affect the XML declaration one would assume to be in tree (although that's needed for ElementTree.write()). See How to write XML declaration using xml.etree.ElementTree.

Upvotes: 12

Jim H.
Jim H.

Reputation: 5579

If you're using xml.etree.ElementTree.parse to parse from a file, then you can use xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring to get the root Element of the document. Often you don't actually need an ElementTree.

See xml.etree.ElementTree

Upvotes: 117

karlcow
karlcow

Reputation: 6972

You need the xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(text)

from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML, fromstring
myxml = fromstring(text)

Upvotes: 21

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