Counting number of xml tags in python using xml.dom.minidom

Question

My XML file test.xml contains the following tags

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<AppName>
    <author>Subho Halder</author>
    <description> Description</description>
    <date>2012-11-06</date>
        <out>Output 1</out>
        <out>Output 2</out>
        <out>Output 3</out>
</AppName>

I want to count the number of times the <out> tag has occured

This is my python code so far which I have written:

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
file = open('test.xml','r')
data = file.read()
file.close()
dom = parseString(data)
if (len(dom.getElementsByTagName('author'))!=0):
    xmlTag = dom.getElementsByTagName('author')[0].toxml()
    author = xmlTag.replace('<author>','').replace('</author>','')
    print author

Can someone help me out here?

Answer 1

Try len(dom.getElementsByTagName('out'))

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
file = open('test.xml','r')
data = file.read()
file.close()
dom = parseString(data)
print len(dom.getElementsByTagName('out'))

gives

3

Answer 2

I would recommend using lxml

import lxml.etree
doc = lxml.etree.parse(test.xml)
count = doc.xpath('count(//out)')

You can look up more information on XPATH here .

Answer 3

If you want you can also use ElementTree . With the function below you will get a dictionary with the tag names as the key and number of times this tag is encountered in you XML file.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from collections import Counter

def count_tags(filename):
        my_tags = []
        for event, element in ET.iterparse(filename):
            my_tags.append(element.tag)
        my_keys = Counter(my_tags).keys()
        my_values = Counter(my_tags).values()
        my_dict = dict(zip(my_keys, my_values))
        return my_dict