Choosing a specific XML node using lxml in Python

Question

I'm from a VBScript background and new to lxml with Python.

In VBScript, to choose a specific node, I would simply do something like:

Set myNode = xmlDoc.selectSingleNode("/node1/node2/myNode") .

What I have done with Python:

from lxml import etree
xmlDoc = etree.parse(fileName)
myNode = 

Question : So what should be written in front of myNode to be able to select it?

Preferably without using XPath ? Also taking lxml into account

Answer 1

You could use something like:

myNode = xmlDoc.find('node2/myNode')

The etree.parse function will return a root node (ie your node1 ), so you don't need to use an absolute path.

Example

content = '''
<root>
<div>
  <p>content 1</p>
</div>
</root>
'''

from lxml import etree

xmlDoc = etree.fromstring(content)
paragraph_element = xmlDoc.find('div/p')
print(paragraph_element)

Output

<Element p at 0x9f54bc8>

Note: For my example I have used the function etree.fromstring . This is purely for demonstration purposes, so you can see a workable example using a string. The function etree.parse should generate the same result when working with files rather than strings.

Aside: Why not use XPath? It is extremely powerful!