Python：从XML树中的标签内部的标签中提取文本

Question

I am currently parsing a Wikipedia dump, trying to extract some useful information. The parsing takes place in XML, and I want to extract only the text / content for each page. Now I'm wondering how you can find all text inside a tag that is inside another tag. I searched for similar questions, but only found the ones having problems with a singular tag. Here is an example of what I want to achieve:

  <revision>
    <timestamp>2001-01-15T13:15:00Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Foobar</username>
      <id>65536</id>
    </contributor>
    <comment>I have just one thing to say!</comment>
    <text>A bunch of [[text]] here.</text>
    <minor />
  </revision>

  <example_tag>
    <timestamp>2001-01-15T13:15:00Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Foobar</username>
      <id>65536</id>
    </contributor>
    <comment>I have just one thing to say!</comment>
    <text>A bunch of [[text]] here.</text>
    <minor />
  </example_tag>

How can I extract the text inside the text tag, but only when it is included in the revision tree?

Answer 1

You can use the xml.etree.elementtree package for that and use an XPath query:

root = the_xml_string
for content in root.findall():
    # ... process content, for instance
    print(content)

(where the_xml_string is a string containing the XML code).

Or obtain a list of the text elements with list comprehension:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

texts = ET.fromstring(the_xml_string).findall('.//revision/othertag')

So the .text has the inner text. Note that you will have to replace othertag with the tag (for instance text ). If that tag can be arbitrary deep in the revision tag, you should use .//revision//othertag as XPath query.