How can I find elements with attributes within a list?

Question

How can I find the elements with different attributes with lxml on python ?

for example

<Form>
    <Subform ind="0">
        <Check ind="0">0</Check>
        <Check ind="1">1</Check>
        <Check ind="2">2</Check>
        <Check ind="3">3</Check>
    </Subform>
</Form>

to retrieve the Checks I do:

tree.findall("./Form/Subform/Check")

to get the first:

tree.findall("./Form/Subform/Check[@ind='0']")

but what I want to do is something like

tree.findall("./Form/Subform/Check[@ind='0' or @ind='1']")

To retrieve the first and second only (or first and last)

How can I do that with lxml ?

Don't think this was a duplicate of that question - it's just findall vs xpath question. — alecxe, Mar 29 '16 at 14:06

alecxe · Answer 1 · 2016-03-29T13:06:33.847

1

tree.findall("./Form/Subform/Check[@ind='0' or @ind='1']")

The expression is valid and this will work in lxml with xpath() method. If you want to make it "scalable", you can dynamically construct the expression:

values = ["0", "1"]
condition = " or ".join("@ind = '%s'" % value for value in values)
print(root.xpath("//Subform/Check[%s]" % condition))

edited Mar 29 '16 at 13:06

answered Mar 29 '16 at 13:01

alecxe

462,703
120
1,088
1,195

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 29 '16 at 13:02

1

That expression is correct but you need to use xpath() method which provide full XPath 1.0 support. findall() only support limited subset of XPath as xml.etree.ElementTree does :

tree.xpath("/Form/Subform/Check[@ind='0' or @ind='1']")

answered Mar 29 '16 at 13:02

har07

88,338
12
84
137

How can I find elements with attributes within a list?

2 Answers2