Find element by text with XPath in ElementTree

Question

Given an XML like the following:

    A
    B

How c

Answer 1

If you want to use the standard library ElementTree, rather than lxml, you can use iteration to find all sub elements with a particular text value. For example:

import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

s = """
    A
    B
"""

e = etree.fromstring(s)

if sys.version_info < (2, 7):
    found = [element for element in e.getiterator() if element.text == 'A']
else:
    found = [element for element in e.iter() if element.text == 'A']

print found[0].text # This prints 'A', honestly!

Note: you may want to perform some stripping of the text value of your elements in the list comprehension.

Edit This will work to any depth in your XML tree. For example,

s = """
    A
    A
"""

found = [element for element in e.getiterator() if element.text == 'A']

for f in found:
    print f

will print