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Python 3: An interactive deep dive

Parsing XML

Explore how to parse XML documents using Python's built-in ElementTree library. Understand the structure of XML elements, namespaces, attributes, and how to access and iterate through child elements to effectively manage XML data.

We'll cover the following...

Python can parse XML documents in several ways. It has traditional DOM and SAX parsers, but I will focus on a different library called ElementTree.

Python 3.5
import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree    #①
tree = etree.parse('feed.xml')           #②
root = tree.getroot()                    #③
root                                     #④
#<Element {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}feed at cd1eb0>

① The ElementTree library is part of the Python standard library, in xml.etree.ElementTree.

② The primary entry point for the ElementTree library is the parse() function, which can take a filename or a file-like object. This function parses the entire document at once. If memory is tight, there are ways to parse an xml ...