Question

I have an XML document in which I want to search for some elements and if they match some criteria
I would like to delete them

However, I cannot seem to be able to access the parent of the element so that I can delete it

file = open('test.xml', "r")
elem = ElementTree.parse(file)

namespace = "{http://somens}"

props = elem.findall('.//{0}prop'.format(namespace))
for prop in props:
    type = prop.attrib.get('type', None)
    if type == 'json':
        value = json.loads(prop.attrib['value'])
        if value['name'] == 'Page1.Button1':
            #here I need to access the parent of prop
            # in order to delete the prop

Is there a way I can do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can remove child elements with the according remove method. To remove an element you have to call its parents remove method. Unfortunately Element does not provide a reference to its parents, so it is up to you to keep track of parent/child relations (which speaks against your use of elem.findall())

A proposed solution could look like this:

root = elem.getroot()
for child in root:
    if child.name != "prop":
        continue
    if True:# TODO: do your check here!
        root.remove(child)

PS: don’t use prop.attrib.get(), use prop.get(), as explained here.