XML Parsing in Python

Estimated study time: 12 minutes.

Python includes XML parsing support out of the box through the xml.etree.ElementTree module, which offers a simple, tree-based (DOM-like) way to read and search XML documents.

Reading a File

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('course.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

print(root.tag)                       # 'course'
print(root.find('title').text)        # 'Data Analytics'

Looping Through Elements

<!-- course.xml -->
<course>
  <modules>
    <module>Excel Basics</module>
    <module>SQL for Analysis</module>
  </modules>
</course>

for module in root.find('modules'):
    print(module.text)

Reading Attributes

<course id="DA-101" level="beginner">...</course>

print(root.get('id'))      # 'DA-101'
print(root.get('level'))   # 'beginner'

Parsing from a String

xml_data = "<course><title>Data Analytics</title></course>"
root = ET.fromstring(xml_data)
print(root.find('title').text)

For Very Large Files

For files too large to comfortably load into memory, Python's iterparse() function offers a SAX-like streaming approach, processing elements as they're read rather than loading the whole tree at once.