CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlelementtree
YXD
YXD

Reputation: 32511

Python ElementTree: Parsing a string and getting ElementTree instance

I have a string containing XML data that is returned from an http request.

I am using ElementTree to parse the data, and I want to then search recursively for an element.

According to this question, I can only search recursively with result.findall() if result is of type ElementTree rather than type Element.

Now xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring() , used to parse the string, returns an Element object, while xml.etree.ElementTree.parse(), used to parse a file, returns an ElementTree object.

My question is then: How can I parse the string and get an ElementTree instance? (without any madness like writing to a temporary file)

Upvotes: 22

Views: 21530

Answers (2)

ekhumoro
ekhumoro

Reputation: 120568

Turn your string into a file-like object and use ElementTree.parse:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from cStringIO import StringIO

tree = ElementTree.parse(StringIO(string))

Upvotes: 8

jcollado
jcollado

Reputation: 40374

When you use ElementTree.fromstring() what you're getting back is basically the root of the tree, so if you create a new tree like this ElementTree.ElementTree(root) you'll get you're looking for.

So, to make it clearer:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
tree = ElementTree.ElementTree(ElementTree.fromstring(<your_xml_string>))

or:

from xml.etree.ElementTree import fromstring, ElementTree
tree = ElementTree(fromstring(<your_xml_string>))

Upvotes: 32

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