Python XPath SyntaxError: invalid predicate

Question

i am trying to parse an xml like

    

       
       XBV

       

        

Answer 1

ElementTree's XPath support is limited. Use other library like lxml:

import lxml.etree
root = lxml.etree.parse('test.xml')

path="./pages/page/paragraph[text()='GHF']"
print root.xpath(path)

Answer 2

As @falsetru mentioned, ElementTree doesn't support text() predicate, but it supports matching child element by text, so in this example, it is possible to search for a page that has a paragraph with specific text, using the path ./pages/page[paragraph='GHF']. The problem here is that there are multiple paragraph tags in a page, so one would have to iterate for the specific paragraph. In my case, I needed to find the version of a dependency in a maven pom.xml, and there is only a single version child so the following worked:

In [1]: import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

In [2] ns = {"pom": "http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"}

In [3] print ET.parse("pom.xml").findall(".//pom:dependencies/pom:dependency[pom:artifactId='some-artifact-with-hardcoded-version']/pom:version", ns)[0].text
Out[1]: '1.2.3'