Parsing xml childnodes in python

Question

I have got this xml file :

 <ItemArray>
    <Item>
      <GiftIcon>0</GiftIcon>
      <HitCounter>NoHitCounter</HitCounter>
      <Quantity>1</Quantity>
      <TimeLeft>P9DT17H35M6S</TimeLeft>
      <Title>Table</Title>
    </Item>
    <Item>
      <GiftIcon>0</GiftIcon>
      <HitCounter>NoHitCounter</HitCounter>
      <Quantity>1</Quantity>
      <TimeLeft>PT0S</TimeLeft>
      <Title>Chair</Title>
    </Item>
  </ItemArray>

I would like to return "Title" if "TimeLeft" is not "PT0S" :

So far I have got this :

itemList = response.getElementsByTagName('Item')
children = itemList[0].childNodes
for child in children :
  if child.tagName == "TimeLeft":
    if child.childNodes[0].nodeValue == "PT0S": 
       print "ping"

But I don't know how to get back to the "Title" value from there, what would be a more elegant way to return a childnode's value depending if an other childnode is true or false ?

Answer 1

use xpath :

doc.xpath('.//item[timeleft/text()!="PT0S"]/title/text()' )

Answer 2

You can use Python's ElementTree API and simple list comprehension:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

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

titles = [item.find('Title').text for item in root.findall('Item') if item.find('TimeLeft').text != 'PT0S']

titles will be a list of titles of items for which TimeLeft is not PT0S . This is easier to read than an XPath-based solution (if you're not familiar with XPath) in my opinion.