Python Minidom XML Query

Question

I'm trying to query this XML with lxml:

<lista_tareas>
    <tarea id="1" realizzato="False" data_limite="12/10/2012" priorita="1">
    <description>XML TEST</description>
</tarea>
<tarea id="2" realizzato="False" data_limite="12/10/2012" priorita="1">
    <description>XML TEST2</description>
</tarea>

I wrote this code:

from lxml import etree
doc = etree.parse(file_path)    

root = etree.Element("lista_tareas")

for x in root:
    z = x.Element("tarea")
    for y in z:
        element_text = y.Element("description").text
        print element_text

It doesn't print anything, could you suggest me how to do?

Answer 1

You do not want to use the minidom; use the ElementTree API instead. The DOM API is a very verbose and constrained API, the ElementTree API plays to Python's strengths instead.

The MiniDOM module doesn't offer any query API like you are looking for.

You can use the bundled xml.etree.ElementTree module, or you could install lxml, which offers more powerful XPath and other query options.

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

for c in root.findall("./Root_Node[@id='1']/sub_node"):
    # Do something with c