Python: xPath not available in ElementTree

elementtree, iterparse, python, python-2.7, xml-parsing

Solution

`xml.etree.ElementTree` provides limited support for XPath expressions for its `Element` class `find`, `findall` and `findtext` methods (there's no `xpath` method: that's why you are getting an error).

Also, if you call `clear()` on an element to conserve used memory, you need to do it only after you've finished processing the element and all its children.

Therefore, you need to to change your code to something similar to the following:

for event, elem in context:
    for child in elem.findall(".//key"):
        # process child
    elem.clear()
    root.clear()

Problem

I am trying to parse iTunes Playlist by using `iterparse()` of `ElementTree` but getting following error: ``` AttributeError: 'Element' object has no attribute 'xpath' ``` Code is given below: ``` import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET context = ET.iterparse(file,events=("start", "end")) # turn it into an iterator context = iter(context) # get the root element event, root = context.next() for event, elem in context: z = elem.xpath(".//key") elem.clear() root.clear() print z ``` What I am doing wrong? File is too big so I have to use `iterparse()` anyway.

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