how to recursively iterate over XML tags in Python using ElementTree?
python, xml
Solution
To iterate over all nodes, use the `iter` method on the `ElementTree`, not the root Element.
The root is an Element, just like the other elements in the tree and only really has context of its own attributes and children. The `ElementTree` has the context for all Elements.
For example, given this xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank>1</rank>
<year>2008</year>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
<neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank>4</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
</country>
<country name="Panama">
<rank>68</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>13600</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
<neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
</country>
</data>
You can do the following
>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> tree = ET.parse('test.xml')
>>> for elem in tree.iter():
... print elem
...
<Element 'data' at 0x10b2d7b50>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2d7b90>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2d7bd0>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2d7c50>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2d7d10>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2d7e90>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2d7ed0>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2d7f10>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2d7f50>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2d7f90>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2d7fd0>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db050>
<Element 'country' at 0x10b2db090>
<Element 'rank' at 0x10b2db0d0>
<Element 'year' at 0x10b2db110>
<Element 'gdppc' at 0x10b2db150>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db190>
<Element 'neighbor' at 0x10b2db1d0>
Problem
I am trying to iterate over all nodes in a tree using ElementTree. I do something like: ``` tree = ET.parse("/tmp/test.xml") root = tree.getroot() for child in root: ### do something with child ``` The problem is that child is an Element object and not `ElementTree` object, so I can't further look into it and recurse to iterate over its elements. Is there a way to iterate differently over "root" so that it iterates over the top-level nodes in the tree (immediate children) and returns the same class as the root itself?