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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T07:33:42+00:00

What is the preferred XML processor to use with Python? Some choices are minidom

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What is the preferred XML processor to use with Python?

Some choices are

  • minidom
  • PyXML
  • ElementTree
  • …

EDIT: I will need to be able to read in documents and manipulate them. I also require pretty print functionality.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    lxml is where it’s at.

    Here’s some example code:

    import textwrap
from os.path import join

from lxml import etree

# string to Element
tree = etree.XML(textwrap.dedent('''
  <foo_tag>
    foo text
    <bar_tag some_attr='ok'>bar text</bar_tag>
  </foo_tag>
  '''))
print 'root text: ' , tree.text
print 'pretty_print: '
print etree.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True)
print 'last child: (%s) (%s)' % (tree[-1].tag, tree[-1].text)
print

# filename to ElementTree
tree = etree.parse('some_file.xhtml')

def recurse(root, depth):
  line = '  ' * depth + root.tag + ' {%s}' % ', '.join(root.attrib.keys())
  if root.text:
    line += ' <%s>' % root.text.strip()
  print line
  for child in root:
    recurse(child, depth + 1)
print 'recurse tree:'
recurse(tree.getroot(), 0)
print

print 'find title: ', tree.findtext('html/head/title')
print 'find title again: ', tree.find('html').find('head').find('title').text

    Here’s some_file.xhtml which you can use for testing:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
  <metadata/>
  <html>
    <head>
      <title style="bold">Page Title</title>
      <span>Here's a <a href="google.com">link</a> to somewhere.</span>
    </head>
    <body bgcolor="#ffffff">Hello, World!</body>
  </html>
</root>
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