Search for elements which contains a string in its text or in any of its descendant

Question

The title says it all. I want to search for all element, say Node1, whose "Hello World!" appears in its text, or any of its decedent. If the string appears in a descendant, I still want to get Node1, and not that descendant.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <Node1 id="Node1">Hello World! from Node1
    </Node1>

    <Node1 id="Node2">Nothing to see here
    </Node1>

    <Node1 id="Node3">
        Some text goes here
        <Node2>
            More text
            <Node3>Hellow World! from Node3 </Node3>
        </Node2>
    </Node1>
</data>

With `lxml`, you can check the following [link](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14299978/how-to-use-lxml-to-find-an-element-by-text) — Physicing, Oct 02 '19 at 20:43
@Physicing thanks, unfortunately, I'm only allowed to use plain ElementTree — sean, Oct 02 '19 at 20:53

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 02 '19 at 21:17

With ElementTree I think you could do something like

import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

s = """<root>
<element>A</element>
  <element2>C</element2>
    <element3>TEST</element3>
<element>B</element>
  <element2>D</element2>
    <element3>Test</element3>
</root>"""

e = etree.fromstring(s)

found = [element for element in e.iter() if element.text == 'Test']

print(found[0])

Returns:

<Element 'element3' at 0x7f9edb7e7a98>

Reference:

Find element by text with XPath in ElementTree Answered by Chris

Thanks. But this approach only returns the immediate node, e.g. Node3 in my example, instead of the Node1 that I want to search for. — sean, Oct 02 '19 at 22:01

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 03 '19 at 07:26

See below

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = '''<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <Node1 id="Node1">Hello World! from Node1
    </Node1>

    <Node1 id="Node2">Nothing to see here
    </Node1>

    <Node1 id="Node3">
        Some text goes here
        <Node2>
            More text
            <Node3>Hello World! from Node3 </Node3>
        </Node2>
    </Node1>
</data>'''


def scan_node(node, txt, result):
    """
    Scan the node (recursively) and look for the text 'txt'
    :param node:
    :param txt:
    :return:
    """
    children = list(node)
    for child in children:
        if txt in child.text:
            result.append(child)
        scan_node(child, txt, result)


root = ET.fromstring(xml)
result = []
scan_node(root, 'Hello World', result)
print(result)

output

[<Element 'Node1' at 0x00723A80>, <Element 'Node3' at 0x00723C30>]

Search for elements which contains a string in its text or in any of its descendant

2 Answers2