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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T02:09:10+00:00

I’ve decided it’d be nice to have a way to generically create a dictionary

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I’ve decided it’d be nice to have a way to generically create a dictionary from an XML string.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

response = '<some><generic><xml></xml></generic></some>'
targetTree = ET.fromstring(response)

# Do something cool here

for key in my_cool_dict:
    print '{0} = {1}'.format(key, my_cool_dict[key])

I’ve found nifty ways of iterating through your elements:

for elem in targetTree.findall('some'):
    for child in elem.getchildren():
        print i.text

These kinds of things require I know the XML tags. What if I don’t know what I’m receiving? How can I create my_cool_dict where the key is the name of the tag and the value is the value between the tags?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If it is flat (that is, the dictionary will not contain other dictionaries), then this should work:

    my_cool_dict = {}
for element in some_parent_element:
    my_cool_dict[element.tag] = element.text

    For example, if some_parent_element represents this element:

    <question>
    <title>How do I make a `dict` from XML in Python?</title>
    <tags>python xml</tags>
    <body>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</body>
</question>

    Then run your code:

    for key in my_cool_dict:
    print '{0} = {1}'.format(key, my_cool_dict[key])

    You’ll get this:

    body = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
tags = python xml
title = How do I make a `dict` from XML in Python?
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