Python Lxml (objectify): Checking whether a tag exists

Question

I need to check whether a certain tag exists in an xml file.

For example, I want to see if the tag exists in this snippet:

Answer 1

If your document tends to be relatively short you can iterate over all children of

looking for tags matching your set of variable names:

tree = lxml.etree.fromstring(DATA)
NAMES = set(['elem1', 'elem3'])
for node in tree.iterchildren():
    if node.tag in NAMES:
        print 'found', node.tag

Or you can search for each variable name one at a time:

for tag in ('elem1', 'elem3'):
    if tree.find(tag) is not None:
        print 'found', tag