How can I check the existence of attributes and tags in XML before parsing?

Question

I\'m parsing an XML file via Element Tree in python and and writing the content to a cpp file.

The content of children tags will be variant for different tags. For

Answer 1

If a tag doesn't exist, .find() indeed returns None. Simply test for that value:

for event in root.findall('event'):
    party = event.find('party')
    if party is None:
        continue
    parties = party.text
    children = event.get('value')

You already use .get() on event to test for the value the attribute; it returns None as well if the attribute does not exist.

Attributes are stored in the .attrib dictionary, so you can use standard Python techniques to test for the attribute explicitly too:

if 'value' in event.attrib:
    # value attribute is present.