Question

I need to completely remove elements, based on the contents of an attribute, using python’s lxml. Example:

import lxml.etree as et

xml="""
<groceries>
  <fruit state="rotten">apple</fruit>
  <fruit state="fresh">pear</fruit>
  <fruit state="fresh">starfruit</fruit>
  <fruit state="rotten">mango</fruit>
  <fruit state="fresh">peach</fruit>
</groceries>
"""

tree=et.fromstring(xml)

for bad in tree.xpath("//fruit[@state=\'rotten\']"):
  #remove this element from the tree

print et.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True)

I would like this to print:

<groceries>
  <fruit state="fresh">pear</fruit>
  <fruit state="fresh">starfruit</fruit>
  <fruit state="fresh">peach</fruit>
</groceries>

Is there a way to do this without storing a temporary variable and printing to it manually, as:

newxml="<groceries>\n"
for elt in tree.xpath('//fruit[@state=\'fresh\']'):
  newxml+=et.tostring(elt)

newxml+="</groceries>"

Answer 1

Use the remove method of an xmlElement :

tree=et.fromstring(xml)

for bad in tree.xpath("//fruit[@state=\'rotten\']"):
  bad.getparent().remove(bad)     # here I grab the parent of the element to call the remove directly on it

print et.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True, xml_declaration=True)

If I had to compare with the @Acorn version, mine will work even if the elements to remove are not directly under the root node of your xml.