Question

I am XML file, there are 10 sub-children (same hierarchy) of root, having the name ‘testCase’

I am not able to figure out the following:
Firstly, I am doing the following to get all the sub-children:

for testCase in root.iter('testCase'):

1. I need to get some attribute from the last sub-child ‘testCase’. But how do i know that it is the last ‘testCase’. Is there a way to count them?
2. Also, is there a way to access the nth sub-child without having to go through the iter()?

Answer 1

Concerning this type of manipulations, you should use XPath, which is a common and simple way to browse XML trees. I don’t think the standard Python ElementTree support XPath, but lxml does (very commonly used as well), here is an example:

Get last child:

>>> text = """<Root>
    <Child name="child1" />
    <Child name="child2" />
    <Child name="child3" />
    <Child name="child4" />
    <Child name="child5" />
</Root>"""
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> root = etree.fromstring(text)
>>> last_tag = root.xpath('/Root/Child[last()]')[0]
>>> last_tag.attrib['name']
'child5'

Direct access to element number #n:

>>> tag3 = root.xpath('/Root/Child[3]')[0]
>>> tag3.attrib['name']
'child3'