Question

I have an XML document as a str. Now, in the XSD <foo> is unbounded, and while most of the time there is only 1, there COULD be more. I’m trying to use ElementTree, but am running into an issue:

>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import fromstring
>>> 
>>> xml_str = """<?xml version="1.0"?>
... <foo>
...     <bar>
...         <baz>Spam</baz>
...         <qux>Eggs</qux>
...     </bar>
... </foo>"""
>>> # Try to get the document
>>> el = fromstring(xml_str)
>>> el.findall('foo')
[]
>>> el.findall('bar')
[<Element 'bar' at 0x1004acb90>]

Clearly, I need to loop through the <foo>s, but because <foo> is at the root, I can’t. Obviously, I could create an element called <root> and put el inside of it, but is there a more correct way of doing this?

Answer 1

Each XML document is supposed to have exactly one root element. You will need to adjust your XML if you want to support multiple foo elements.