Create list of a list from XML dataset in ElementTree python

Question

i have a question. How can i create list of a list from xml dataset in ElemenTree python? for example i have this dataset :

<data>
    <article>
        <author> Tony </author>
    </article>
    <article>
        <author> Andy </author>
        <author> John </author>
    </article>
    <article>
        <author> Paul </author>
        <author> leon </author>
    </article>
</data>

There is a specific function like :

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

for author in root.iter('author'):
  print(author.text, author.attrib['pid'])

that would find and show all author in dataset in single list [Tony, Andy, John, Paul, Leon]. How can i improve those code above so i can get result author in list of s list [[Tony], [Andy, John], [Paul, Leon]]? Maybe theres is a specific function to perform this?

balderman · Accepted Answer · 2022-11-02 20:03:16Z

1

One liner can do the magic

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = '''<data>
    <article>
        <author> Tony </author>
    </article>
    <article>
        <author> Andy </author>
        <author> John </author>
    </article>
    <article>
        <author> Paul </author>
        <author> leon </author>
    </article>
</data>'''
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
authors = [[aut.text for aut in art.findall('author')] for art in root.findall('./article')]
print(authors)

output

[[' Tony '], [' Andy ', ' John '], [' Paul ', ' leon ']]

answered Nov 2, 2022 at 20:03

balderman

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2 Comments

Adi OS Over a year ago

If we use those [[aut.text for aut in art.findall('author')] for art in root.findall('./article')] (still confusing to me), which for run first?

balderman Over a year ago

the article is the external loop and author is the internal loop

Adi OS · Accepted Answer · 2022-11-02 04:18:52Z

0

I found the solution. It's quite simple. Just create nested loop to iterate child from root and then child2 from child with specific tag.

author_connection = []

for child in root:
    
    conn = []
    author_connection.append(conn)

    for child2 in child.iter('author'):
        conn.append(child2.text)

And the output is

[[Tony], [Andy, John], [Paul, Leon]]

answered Nov 2, 2022 at 4:18

Adi OS

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