I want to use an xpath expression to get the value of an attribute.
I expected the following to work
from lxml import etree for customer in etree.parse('file.xml').getroot().findall('BOB'): print customer.find('./@NAME')
but this gives an error :
Traceback (most recent call last): File "bob.py", line 22, in <module> print customer.find('./@ID') File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 1409, in lxml.etree._Element.find (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:39972) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/lxml/_elementpath.py", line 272, in find it = iterfind(elem, path, namespaces) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/lxml/_elementpath.py", line 262, in iterfind selector = _build_path_iterator(path, namespaces) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/lxml/_elementpath.py", line 246, in _build_path_iterator selector.append(ops[token[0]](_next, token)) KeyError: '@'
Am I wrong to expect this to work?
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Answer
find
and findall
only implement a subset of XPath. Their presence is meant to provide compatibility with other ElementTree implementations (like ElementTree
and cElementTree
).
The xpath
method, in contrast, provides full access to XPath 1.0:
print customer.xpath('./@NAME')[0]
However, you could instead use get
:
print customer.get('NAME')
or attrib
:
print customer.attrib['NAME']