Search and remove element with elementTree in Python

Question

I have an XML document in which I want to search for some elements and if they match some criteria I would like to delete them

However, I cannot seem to be able to access the parent of the element so that I can delete it

file = open('test.xml', "r")
elem = ElementTree.parse(file)

namespace = "{http://somens}"

props = elem.findall('.//{0}prop'.format(namespace))
for prop in props:
    type = prop.attrib.get('type', None)
    if type == 'json':
        value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
        if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
            #here I need to access the parent of prop
            # in order to delete the prop

Is there a way I can do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can remove child elements with the according remove method. To remove an element you have to call its parents remove method. Unfortunately Element does not provide a reference to its parents, so it is up to you to keep track of parent/child relations (which speaks against your use of elem.findall())

A proposed solution could look like this:

root = elem.getroot()
for child in root:
    if child.name != "prop":
        continue
    if True:# TODO: do your check here!
        root.remove(child)

PS: don't use prop.attrib.get(), use prop.get(), as explained here.

Answer 2

You could use xpath to select an Element's parent.

file = open('test.xml', "r")
elem = ElementTree.parse(file)

namespace = "{http://somens}"

props = elem.findall('.//{0}prop'.format(namespace))
for prop in props:
    type = prop.get('type', None)
    if type == 'json':
        value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
        if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
            # Get parent and remove this prop
            parent = prop.find("..")
            parent.remove(prop)

http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#supported-xpath-syntax

Except if you try that it doesn't work: http://elmpowered.skawaii.net/?p=74

So instead you have to:

file = open('test.xml', "r")
elem = ElementTree.parse(file)

namespace = "{http://somens}"
search = './/{0}prop'.format(namespace)

# Use xpath to get all parents of props    
prop_parents = elem.findall(search + '/..')
for parent in prop_parents:
    # Still have to find and iterate through child props
    for prop in parent.findall(search):
        type = prop.get('type', None)
        if type == 'json':
            value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
            if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
                parent.remove(prop)

It is two searches and a nested loop. The inner search is only on Elements known to contain props as first children, but that may not mean much depending on your schema.

Answer 3

Using the fact that every child must have a parent, I'm going to simplify @kitsu.eb's example. f using the findall command to get the children and parents, their indices will be equivalent.

    file = open('test.xml', "r")
    elem = ElementTree.parse(file)

    namespace = "{http://somens}"
    search = './/{0}prop'.format(namespace)

    # Use xpath to get all parents of props    
    prop_parents = elem.findall(search + '/..')

    props = elem.findall('.//{0}prop'.format(namespace))
    for prop in props:
            type = prop.attrib.get('type', None)
            if type == 'json':
                value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
                if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
                    #use the index of the current child to find
                    #its parent and remove the child
                    prop_parents[props.index[prop]].remove(prop)

Answer 4

I know this is an old thread but this kept popping up while I was trying to figure out a similar task. I did not like the accepted answer for two reasons:

1) It doesn't handle multiple nested levels of tags.

2) It will break if multiple xml tags are deleted in the same level one-after-another. Since each element is an index of Element._children you shouldn't delete while forward iterating.

I think a better more versatile solution is this:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
file = 'test.xml'
tree = et.parse(file)
root = tree.getroot()

def iterator(parents, nested=False):
    for child in reversed(parents):
        if nested:
            if len(child) >= 1:
                iterator(child)
        if True:  # Add your entire condition here
            parents.remove(child)

iterator(root, nested=True)

For the OP, this should work - but I don't have the data you're working with to test if it's perfect.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
file = 'test.xml'
tree = et.parse(file)

namespace = "{http://somens}"
props = tree.findall('.//{0}prop'.format(namespace))

def iterator(parents, nested=False):
    for child in reversed(parents):
        if nested:
            if len(child) >= 1:
                iterator(child)
        if prop.attrib.get('type') == 'json':
            value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
            if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
                parents.remove(child)

iterator(props, nested=True)

Answer 5

A solution using lxml module

from lxml import etree

root = ET.fromstring(xml_str)
for e in root.findall('.//{http://some.name.space}node'):
parent = e.getparent()
for child in parent.find('./{http://some.name.space}node'):
    try:
        parent.remove(child)
    except ValueError:
        pass

Answer 6

I like to use an XPath expression for this kind of filtering. Unless I know otherwise, such an expression must be applied at the root level, which means I can't just get a parent and apply the same expression on that parent. However, it seems to me that there is a nice and flexible solution that should work with any supported XPath, as long as none of the sought nodes is the root. It goes something like this:

root = elem.getroot()
# Find all nodes matching the filter string (flt)
nodes = root.findall(flt)
while len(nodes):
    # As long as there are nodes, there should be parents
    # Get the first of all parents to the found nodes
    parent = root.findall(flt+'/..')[0]
    # Use this parent to remove the first node
    parent.remove(nodes[0])
    # Find all remaining nodes
    nodes = root.findall(flt)