Question

I have an XML document called sync_list.xml structured like this:

root = ET.Element("root")
synced = ET.SubElement(root, "synced")
synced.set("name", "Already Synced")
sfile = ET.SubElement(synced, "sfile")
sfile.set("name", "Filename")
sfile.text = "base"

tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
tree.write("sync_list.xml")

so that I end up with:

<root><synced name="Already Synced"><sfile name="Filename">base</sfile></synced></root>

and I’m multiple files within a directory. I would like to “append” those file names as a new sfile entry each time a file is opened. So I would end up with something like this:

<root><synced name="Already Synced"><sfile name="Filename">base</sfile><sfile name="Filename">File1.blah</sfile><sfile name="Filename">File2.blah</sfile><sfile name="Filename">File3.blah</sfile></synced></root>

How would I achieve this? Thank you so much for your help.

Answer 1

You almost there. You just need to read the file back and find the <synced> element in it:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from xml.etree import cElementTree as etree

tree = etree.parse('sync_list.xml')
synced = tree.find('synced')
for filename in ["file\u00b9", "file2", "file3"]:
    sfile = etree.SubElement(synced, "sfile", name="Filename")
    sfile.text = filename

tree.write('sync_list_appended.xml', encoding='utf-8', xml_declaration=True)