Get attribute names and values from ElementTree

Question

I have an XML element with several attributes. I\'ve been using the ElementTree package.

After I\'ve parsed a tree from an xml fil

Answer 1

The attrib attribute of an ElementTree element (like the root returned by getroot) is a dictionary. So you can do, for example:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
tree = ElementTree.parse('test.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
print root.attrib

which will output, for your example

{'a': '1', 'b': '2', 'c': '3'}

Answer 2

Each Element has an attribute .attrib that is a dictionary; simply use it's mapping methods to ask it for it's keys or values:

for name, value in root.attrib.items():
    print '{0}="{1}"'.format(name, value)

or

for name in root.attrib:
    print '{0}="{1}"'.format(name, root.attrib[name])

or use .values() or any of the other methods available on a python dict.

To get an individual attribute, use the standard subscription syntax:

print root.attrib['a']

Answer 3

Some nice loop you can use it will get for each element of the xmlObject it's tag, text and attribute it will work for 2 levels XML, it's not the best way to iterate but it can be useful for simple things...

for headTag in xmlObject.getchildren():
    print headTag.tag, headTag.text, headTag.attrib
    for bodyTag in headTag.getchildren():
        print "\t", bodyTag.tag, bodyTag.text, bodyTag.attrib