Question

I am really new to Python and I have the following .xml file:

<A>
  <B>
    <C>NUM123456</C>
    <D>
      <E>123</E>
      <F>Spam</F>
        <G>Apple</G>
    </D>
    <D>
      <E>456</E>
      <F>Egg</F>
        <G>Orange</G>
    </D>
    <D>
      <E>789</E>
      <F>Bacon</F>
        <G>Strawberry</G>
    </D>
    <D>
      <E>0AB</E>
      <F>Cheese</F>
        <G>Cherry</G>
    </D>
  </B>
</A>

I am trying to take just some part of it so that the new .xml file would be:

<A>
  <B>
    <C>NUM123456</C>
    <D>
      <E>456</E>
      <F>Egg</F>
        <G>Orange</G>
    </D>
    <D>
      <E>0AB</E>
      <F>Cheese</F>
        <G>Cherry</G>
    </D>
  </B>
</A>

I am trying to use the .xpath, but it will only start taking writing the new .xml file once it found the distinct node. In other words, node <A> <B> and <C> are not included in the new .xml file. Can anybody help?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to put in the right criteria–I based this filter on the text values from your examples:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from xml.etree import ElementTree
import sys
tree = ElementTree.ElementTree()
tree.parse(sys.stdin)
b = tree.find("B")
for e in b.getiterator("D"):
    if e.find("E").text in ["123", "789"]: 
        b.remove(e)
tree.write(sys.stdout)

Run it like this:

./parse.py < file.xml

to get your desired output.