解析XML属性名称

Question

Python, currently using 2.7 but can easily change to latest and greatest.

Needing to parse this XML and return the INT value contained within the item. This isn't my XML. This is coming from a piece of enterprise level software.

<counters>
<item name="stats/counters/session/responsetime" type="int">1047</item>
<item name="stats/counters/session/responsecount" type="int">7423</item>
<item name="stats/counters/init/inittime" type="int">36339</item>
<item name="stats/counters/init/fetchtime" type="int">8097</item>
<item name="stats/connectionsetups" type="int">579</item>
<item name="stats/activesessions" type="int">4294967289</item>
<item name="stats/activeconnections" type="int">0</item>
</counters>

Code:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import xml

def _getstats():
 resp = requests.get(urlStats)

 #Writing XML to disk. This makes parsing it MUCH easier.
 with open('stats_10.xml', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(resp.content)
    f.close()

tree = ET.parse('stats_10.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

active = root.find('stats/activesessions')

print active

The return is always None. I'm Using ElementTree. Read through the documentation ( https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html ) and many StackOF pages.

I think the problem is that the parser doesn't understand the slash.

Attempted to pull by name using "active = int(root['stats/activesessions'])" in place of root find which returns this error:

TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str

Also tried xmltodict but that was even worse that using ElementTree. The error would always be 'list indices must be integers'.

Lastly, this is a dynamic XML document. Indexing by ROW is not an option because at idle, the software returns 10 rows for example and under a load it return 15, with additional rows being mixed with the other rows. I have to pull by child name.

Thank you in advance for any assistance!

ADDITION:

I can run an iteration through the XML and pull the value. However, as stated above, the XML will change and the number of rows will increase, thus throwing my indices off.

active = root[5].text
print active

Answer 1

I believe the find method is looking for a tag name, not an attribute value. You need to find the item tag, check if it has a name attribute, and then check if the attribute equals "stats/activesessions". If this condition is met, you can read in the value of the item tag.

Answer 2

This is obviously me not understanding XML and how it's structured. Added this in my code and I get the return value I'm looking for.

for item in root.findall("./item[@name='system/starttime']"):
starttime = int(item.text)