Question

(Python 3.2)

I’m using etree to parse some XML. To do this, I’m recursively iterating through the document with iterdescendants(). So, something like:

for elem in doc.iterdescendants():
    if elem.tag == "tag":
        pass # Further processing

Sometimes, I process a parent tag that contains children that I want to prevent from being processed in a later recursion. Is it ok to destroy the children?

In my initial testing, I’ve tried:

for child in elem.getchildren(): child.clear()

For some reason, this results in the element immediately after elem from being processed. It’s like the element gets removed as well.

I then tried this, which works (in that it removes the parent and its children, but doesn’t result in any subsequent siblings of the parent from being skipped/affected as well):

elem.clear()

Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks,

Answer 1

I have the following code in place of yours and it seems to work, deleting all the child elements. I use iterfind to find all descendants with the tag and delete them.

for element in doc.iterfind('.//%s'%tag):
    element.getparent().remove(element)