Question

I have the following XML structure

<root>
    <OuterLevel>
        <Node>
            <Name>NodeA</Name>
        </Node>
        <Node>
            <Name>NodeB</Name>
        <Node>
        <SpecialNode>
            <Name>NodeZ</Name>
        </SpecialNode>
    </OuterLevel>
 </root>

I did some reading on python’s ElementTree XML API and I wanted to compare an element’s tag with a string. According to the document found on http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html, the tag of an element is a string. I wrote the following python code to test for equality:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('sampleFile.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

if root[0][0].tag != 'Node'
print("not equal")

However, when I ran the python code. I keep getting SyntaxError: invalid syntax with a carrot sign pointing at the ‘ after Node. I can print the results of root[0][0].tag Is it not possible to compare that with a string?

Answer 1

You need a colon after the if statement. E.g:

if root[0][0].tag != 'Node':
    print("not equal")

A syntax error means there was an error when trying to understand your code – not while trying to run it. It’s worth noting as it makes it easier to find the root cause of the problem.