Question

I have a xml in which I have to search for a tag and replace the value of tag with a new values. For example,

<tag-Name>oldName</tag-Name>  

and replace oldName to newName like

<tag-Name>newName</tag-Name>    

and save the xml. How can I do that without using thirdparty lib like BeautifulSoup

Thank you

Answer 1

The best option from the standard lib is (I think) the xml.etree package.

Assuming that your example tag occurs only once somewhere in the document:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
# or for a faster C implementation
# import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree

tree = etree.parse('input.xml')
elem = tree.find('//tag-Name') # finds the first occurrence of element tag-Name
elem.text = 'newName'
tree.write('output.xml')

Or if there are multiple occurrences of tag-Name, and you want to change them all if they have “oldName” as content:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree

tree = etree.parse('input.xml')
for elem in tree.findall('//tag-Name'):
    if elem.text == 'oldName':
        elem.text = 'newName'
# some output options for example
tree.write('output.xml', encoding='utf-8', xml_declaration=True)