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Python 3: An interactive deep dive

Going Further With lxml

Discover how to leverage the lxml library in Python 3 to parse large XML documents efficiently, utilize a fully compatible ElementTree API, and implement advanced XPath 1.0 queries. Learn to handle namespaces and attributes to perform complex XML data extraction and querying.

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lxml is an open source third-party library that builds on the popular libxml2 parser. It provides a 100% compatible ElementTree api, then extends it with full XPath 1.0 support and a few other niceties. There are installers available for Windows; Linux users should always try to use distribution-specific tools like yum or apt-get to install precompiled binaries from their repositories. Otherwise you’ll need to install lxml manually.

Python 3.5
from lxml import etree                                       #①
tree = etree.parse('feed.xml')                               #②
root = tree.getroot()                                        #③
print (root.findall('{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry'))   #④
#[<Element {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry at e2b4e0>,
# <Element {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry at e2b510>,
# <Element {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry at e2b540>]

① Once imported, lxml provides the same api as the built-in ElementTree library.

② parse() function: same as ElementTree.

③ getroot() method: also the same. ...