Python xml ElementTree from a string source?

Question

The ElementTree.parse reads from a file, how can I use this if I already have the XML data in a string?

Maybe I am missing something here, but there must be a way to

Answer 1

io.StringIO is another option for getting XML into xml.etree.ElementTree:

import io
f = io.StringIO(xmlstring)
tree = ET.parse(f)
root = tree.getroot()

Hovever, it does not affect the XML declaration one would assume to be in tree (although that's needed for ElementTree.write()). See How to write XML declaration using xml.etree.ElementTree.

Answer 2

If you're using xml.etree.ElementTree.parse to parse from a file, then you can use xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring to parse from text.

See xml.etree.ElementTree

Answer 3

You need the xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(text)

from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML, fromstring
myxml = fromstring(text)

Answer 4

You can parse the text as a string, which creates an Element, and create an ElementTree using that Element.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(xmlstring))

I just came across this issue and the documentation, while complete, is not very straightforward on the difference in usage between the parse() and fromstring() methods.