Specific pathing to find XML elements using minidom in Python
dom, python, xml
Solution
If you want to get items from a specific category, you can do so by grabbing the parent element first.
For example:
Code:
xmldoc = minidom.parse('sampleXML.xml')
#Grab the first occurence of the "secondSetOfItems" element
second_items = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("secondSetOfItems")[0]
item_list = second_items.getElementsByTagName("item")
for item in item_list:
print item.attributes['name'].value
Output:
item5
item6
item7
item8
Problem
As per this thread, I am using `xml.dom.minidom` to do some very basic XML traversing, read-only. What confuses me is why its `getElementsByTagName` is finding nodes several hierarchy levels deep without explicitly supplying it with their exact path. XML: ``` <data> <items> <item name="item1"></item> <item name="item2"></item> <item name="item3"></item> <item name="item4"></item> </items> <secondSetOfItems> <item name="item5"></item> <item name="item6"></item> <item name="item7"></item> <item name="item8"></item> </secondSetOfItems> </data> ``` Python code: ``` xmldoc = minidom.parse('sampleXML.xml') items = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('item') for item in items: print item.attributes['name'].value ``` Prints: ``` item1 item2 item3 item4 item5 item6 item7 item8 ``` What bothers me is that it implicitly finds tags named `item` under both `data->items` as well as `data->secondSetOfItems`. How do I make it follow an explicit path and only extract items under one of the two categories? E.g. under `data->secondSetOfItems`: ``` item5 item6 item7 item8 ```