XML: How to get Elements by Attribute Value - Python 2.7 and minidom

Martin picture Martin · Jan 29, 2014 · Viewed 26.9k times · Source

I want to get a list of XML Elements based first on TagName and second on Attribute Value. I´m using the xml.dom library and python 2.7.

While it´s easy to get the first step done:

from xml.dom import minidom
xmldoc = minidom.parse(r"C:\File.xml")
PFD = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("PFD")
PNT = PFD.getElementsByTagName("PNT")

I´ve been looking around but cannot find a solution for the second step. Is there something like a .getElementsByAttributeValue that would give me a list to work with?

If the XML looks like this

<PFD>
     <PNT A="1" B=.../>
     <PNT A="1" B=.../>
     <PNT A="2" B=.../>
</PFD>

In need all PNTs where A="1" in a list.

Answer

Xeun picture Xeun · Jan 29, 2014

If you don't find a built-in method, why not iterate over the items?

from xml.dom import minidom
xmldoc = minidom.parse(r"C:\File.xml")
PFD = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("PFD")
PNT = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("PNT")
for element in PNT:
    if element.getAttribute('A') == "1":
        print "element found"

Adding the items to a list should be easy now.