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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T05:26:42+00:00

I have this kind of XML structure (output from the Esprima ASL converted from

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I have this kind of XML structure (output from the Esprima ASL converted from JSON), it can get even more nested than this (ASL.xml):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <program>
    <type>Program</type>
    <body>
        <type>VariableDeclaration</type>
        <declarations>
            <type>VariableDeclarator</type>
            <id>
                <type>Identifier</type>
                <name>answer</name>
            </id>
            <init>
                <type>BinaryExpression</type>
                <operator>*</operator>
                <left>
                    <type>Literal</type>
                    <value>6</value>
                </left>
                <right>
                    <type>Literal</type>
                    <value>7</value>
                </right>
            </init>
        </declarations>
        <kind>var</kind>
    </body>
    </program>

Usualy for XML I use the for node inroot.childNodes` but this works only for the direct children:

import xml.dom.minidom as  md
dom = md.parse("ASL.xml")
root = dom.documentElement
for node in root.childNodes:
    if node.nodeType == node.ELEMENT_NODE:
        print node.tagName,"has value:",  node.nodeValue:, "and is child of:",node.parentNode.tagName

How can I walk all the elements of the XML regardless how many nested elements are?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is probably best achieved with a recursive function. Something like this should do it but I’ve not tested it so consider it pseudocode.

    import xml.dom.minidom as  md

def print_node(root):
    if root.childNodes:
        for node in root.childNodes:
           if node.nodeType == node.ELEMENT_NODE:
               print node.tagName,"has value:",  node.nodeValue, "and is child of:", node.parentNode.tagName
               print_node(node)

dom = md.parse("ASL.xml")
root = dom.documentElement
print_node(root)
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