Question

I have an XML tree like:

<abc>
    <cd>text1</cd>
    <cd>text2</cd>
    <ef>text3</ef>
    <ef>text4</ef>
</abc>

Now I want to save it as a list with tuples like: [(text1,text3),(text2,text4)] .

How do i do it?

Answer 1

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET
# import lxml.etree as ET   # also works

content = '''\
<abc>
    <cd>text1</cd>
    <cd>text2</cd>
    <ef>text3</ef>
    <ef>text4</ef>
</abc>'''

doc = ET.fromstring(content)
texts = (x.text for x in doc)
print(zip(*zip(*[texts]*2)))

yields

[('text1', 'text3'), ('text2', 'text4')]

---

Explanation:

You already know how to parse the XML into a list like this:

In [8]: [x.text for x in doc]
Out[8]: ['text1', 'text2', 'text3', 'text4']

To group items by 2, use the grouper recipe, zip(*[iter]*2):

In [11]: zip(*[texts]*2)
Out[11]: [('text1', 'text2'), ('text3', 'text4')]

Now you can use zip again to group the first items from each tuple, then the second items, etc:

In [14]: zip(*zip(*[texts]*2))
Out[14]: [('text1', 'text3'), ('text2', 'text4')]