Python - Element Tree find

Question

I have an xml string that looks something like this:

I am using the Element Tree library

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<GetCategoriesResponse xmlns="urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents"><CategoryArray><Category><WantedParm1>true</WantedParm1><UnwantedParm1>true</UnwantedParm1><WantedParm2>20081</WantedParm2></Category></CategoryArray></GetCategoriesResponse>

I want to get some values of the Category Node, let's call them Wanted Parms 1 and 2. However I am getting an AttributeError probably because the code I wrote is not able to find the child node of the Category item.

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
XML = #Above Code in String
tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(XML))
root = tree.getroot()
for Category in root[0]:
    one = Category.find("WantedParm1").text
    two = Category.find("WantedParm2").text
    print(one, two)

Welcome to StackOverflow. Please read and follow the posting guidelines in the help documentation. [Minimal, complete, verifiable example](http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve) applies here. We cannot effectively help you until you post your code and accurately describe the problem. "Having issues" is not a problem description. — Prune, Oct 26 '16 at 00:43
@Prune I am really sorry, I pressed submit while typing the question and it uploaded the form. I'm trying to update it asap — Juanvulcano, Oct 26 '16 at 00:44
Understood. However, you still haven't posted a MCVE so we can reproduce the problem. Your call to **find** has returned **None**, but that's about as far as I can take you at this point -- in short, what you already suspected. — Prune, Oct 26 '16 at 00:48
@Prune This is pretty much all the code that interacts. What other information would you like to have? — Juanvulcano, Oct 26 '16 at 00:57
Cut-and-paste code that reproduces the problem. I've wrapped the XML structure in triple quotation marks and run the program, but the error I get is a parse failure in **fromstring**: *xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: mismatched tag: line 6, column 29*, which appears to be the start of **** — Prune, Oct 26 '16 at 01:08
Yes ... and I can now reproduce the problem. Fortunately, someone more familiar with ElementTree found the problem for you. :-) — Prune, Oct 26 '16 at 01:40

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

The XML elements are in the default namespace urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents So all tags get prepended with the full URI of the namespace.

Changing your find() parameter to include the URI should work.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
XML = #Above Code in String
tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(XML))
root = tree.getroot()
for Category in root[0]:
    one = Category.find("{urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents}WantedParm1").text
    two = Category.find("{urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents}WantedParm2").text
    print(one, two)

You can find more information on dealing with namespaces on the element tree docs here or this stack overflow post.

Python - Element Tree find

1 Answers1