Modifying element in xml using python

Question

can anyone please explain how to modify xml element in python using elementtree.

I want to keep the rego AD-4214 and change make 'Tata' into 'Nissan' and model 'Sumo' into 'Skyline'.

Answer 1

This should work:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('your_xml_source.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
root[1][1].text = "Nissan"
root[1][2].text = "Skyline"

getroot() gives you the root element ( <motorvehicle> ), [1] selects its second child, the <vehicle> with rego AD-4214. The secondary indexing, [1] and [2] , gives you AD-4214's <make> and <model> respectively. Then using the text attribute, you can change their text content.

Answer 2

If rewriting the entire file is acceptable ¹ , the easiest way would be to turn the xml file into a dictionary (see for example here: How to convert an XML string to a dictionary? ), do your modifications on that dictionary, and convert this dict back to xml (like for example here: https://pypi.org/project/dicttoxml/ )

¹ Consider lost formatting: whitespace, number formats etc may not be preserved by this.