This is a NamedNodeMap giving the definitions of notations. For notation names defined more than once, only the first definition is provided (others are ignored as required by the XML recommendation). This may be None if the information is not provided by the parser, or if no notations are defined.


The public identifier for the external subset of the document type definition. This will be a string or None.


The system identifier for the external subset of the document type definition. This will be a URI as a string, or None.


Base exception class used for all specific DOM exceptions. This exception class cannot be directly instantiated.


Return a new Document object (the root of the DOM), with a child Element object having the given namespaceUri and qualifiedName. The doctype must be a DocumentType object created by createDocumentType(), or None. In the Python DOM API, the first two arguments can also be None in order to indicate that no Element child is to be created.


Return a new DocumentType object that encapsulates the given qualifiedName, publicId, and systemId strings, representing the information contained in an XML document type declaration.


Return True if the feature identified by the pair of strings feature and version is implemented.


Raised when a specified range of text does not fit into a string. This is not known to be used in the Python DOM implementations, but may be received from DOM implementations not written in Python.


Return the value of the attribute named by name as a string. If no such attribute exists, an empty string is returned, as if the attribute had no value.


Return the Attr node for the attribute named by attrname.


Return an attribute value as a node, given a namespaceURI and localName.


Return the value of the attribute named by namespaceURI and localName as a string. If no such attribute exists, an empty string is returned, as if the attribute had no value.


Same as equivalent method in the Document class.


Return True if the element has an attribute named by name.


Return True if the element has an attribute named by namespaceURI and localName.


Remove an attribute by name. If there is no matching attribute, a NotFoundErr is raised.


Remove and return oldAttr from the attribute list, if present. If oldAttr is not present, NotFoundErr is raised.


Remove an attribute by name. Note that it uses a localName, not a qname. No exception is raised if there is no matching attribute.


Add a new attribute node to the element, replacing an existing attribute if necessary if the name attribute matches. If a replacement occurs, the old attribute node will be returned. If newAttr is already in use, InuseAttributeErr will be raised.


Add a new attribute node to the element, replacing an existing attribute if necessary if the namespaceURI and localName attributes match. If a replacement occurs, the old attribute node will be returned. If newAttr is already in use, InuseAttributeErr will be raised.


Set an attribute value from a string, given a namespaceURI and a qname. Note that a qname is the whole attribute name. This is different than above.


The element type name. In a namespace-using document it may have colons in it. The value is a string.


The value used to indicate that no namespace is associated with a node in the DOM. This is typically found as the namespaceURI of a node, or used as the namespaceURI parameter to a namespaces-specific method.


Return a suitable DOM implementation. The name is either well-known, the module name of a DOM implementation, or None. If it is not None, imports the corresponding module and returns a DOMImplementation object if the import succeeds. If no name is given, and if the environment variable PYTHON_DOM is set, this variable is used to find the implementation.
If name is not given, this examines the available implementations to find one with the required feature set. If no implementation can be found, raise an ImportError. The features list must be a sequence of (feature,
version) pairs which are passed to the hasFeature() method on available DOMImplementation objects.


Raised when an attempt is made to insert a node where the node type is not allowed.


Raised when an index or size parameter to a method is negative or exceeds the allowed values.


Raised when an attempt is made to insert an Attr node that is already present elsewhere in the document.


Raised if a parameter or an operation is not supported on the underlying object.


This exception is raised when a string parameter contains a character that is not permitted in the context it’s being used in by the XML 1.0 recommendation. For example, attempting to create an Element node with a space in the element type name will cause this error to be raised.


Raised when an attempt is made to modify the type of a node.


Raised when an attempt is made to use an object that is not defined or is no longer usable.


Source code: Lib/xml/dom/minidom.py
xml.dom.minidom is a minimal implementation of the Document Object Model interface, with an API similar to that in other languages. It is intended to be simpler than the full DOM and also significantly smaller. Users who are not already proficient with the DOM should consider using the xml.etree.ElementTree module for their XML processing instead.
Warning
The xml.dom.minidom module is not secure against maliciously constructed data. If you need to parse untrusted or unauthenticated data see XML vulnerabilities.
DOM applications typically start by parsing some XML into a DOM. With xml.dom.minidom, this is done through the parse functions:
The parse() function can take either a filename or an open file object.
Return a Document from the given input. filename_or_file may be either a file name, or a file-like object. parser, if given, must be a SAX2 parser object. This function will change the document handler of the parser and activate namespace support; other parser configuration (like setting an entity resolver) must have been done in advance.
If you have XML in a string, you can use the parseString() function instead:
Return a Document that represents the string. This method creates an io.StringIO object for the string and passes that on to parse().
Both functions return a Document object representing the content of the document.
What the parse() and parseString() functions do is connect an XML parser with a “DOM builder” that can accept parse events from any SAX parser and convert them into a DOM tree. The name of the functions are perhaps misleading, but are easy to grasp when learning the interfaces. The parsing of the document will be completed before these functions return; it’s simply that these functions do not provide a parser implementation themselves.
You can also create a Document by calling a method on a “DOM Implementation” object. You can get this object either by calling the getDOMImplementation() function in the xml.dom package or the xml.dom.minidom module. Once you have a Document, you can add child nodes to it to populate the DOM:
Once you have a DOM document object, you can access the parts of your XML document through its properties and methods. These properties are defined in the DOM specification. The main property of the document object is the documentElement property. It gives you the main element in the XML document: the one that holds all others. Here is an example program:
When you are finished with a DOM tree, you may optionally call the unlink() method to encourage early cleanup of the now-unneeded objects. unlink() is an xml.dom.minidom-specific extension to the DOM API that renders the node and its descendants are essentially useless. Otherwise, Python’s garbage collector will eventually take care of the objects in the tree.
See also
The W3C recommendation for the DOM supported by xml.dom.minidom.
The definition of the DOM API for Python is given as part of the xml.dom module documentation. This section lists the differences between the API and xml.dom.minidom.
Break internal references within the DOM so that it will be garbage collected on versions of Python without cyclic GC. Even when cyclic GC is available, using this can make large amounts of memory available sooner, so calling this on DOM objects as soon as they are no longer needed is good practice. This only needs to be called on the Document object, but may be called on child nodes to discard children of that node.
You can avoid calling this method explicitly by using the with statement. The following code will automatically unlink dom when the with block is exited:
Write XML to the writer object. The writer receives texts but not bytes as input, it should have a write() method which matches that of the file object interface. The indent parameter is the indentation of the current node. The addindent parameter is the incremental indentation to use for subnodes of the current one. The newl parameter specifies the string to use to terminate newlines.
For the Document node, an additional keyword argument encoding can be used to specify the encoding field of the XML header.
Silimarly, explicitly stating the standalone argument causes the standalone document declarations to be added to the prologue of the XML document. If the value is set to True, standalone=”yes” is added, otherwise it is set to “no”. Not stating the argument will omit the declaration from the document.
Changed in version 3.8: The writexml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
Return a string or byte string containing the XML represented by the DOM node.
With an explicit encoding 1 argument, the result is a byte string in the specified encoding. With no encoding argument, the result is a Unicode string, and the XML declaration in the resulting string does not specify an encoding. Encoding this string in an encoding other than UTF-8 is likely incorrect, since UTF-8 is the default encoding of XML.
The standalone argument behaves exactly as in writexml().
Changed in version 3.8: The toxml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
Return a pretty-printed version of the document. indent specifies the indentation string and defaults to a tabulator; newl specifies the string emitted at the end of each line and defaults to \n.
The encoding argument behaves like the corresponding argument of toxml().
The standalone argument behaves exactly as in writexml().
Changed in version 3.8: The toprettyxml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
This example program is a fairly realistic example of a simple program. In this particular case, we do not take much advantage of the flexibility of the DOM.
The xml.dom.minidom module is essentially a DOM 1.0-compatible DOM with some DOM 2 features (primarily namespace features).
Usage of the DOM interface in Python is straight-forward. The following mapping rules apply:
The following interfaces have no implementation in xml.dom.minidom:
Most of these reflect information in the XML document that is not of general utility to most DOM users.
The encoding name included in the XML output should conform to the appropriate standards. For example, “UTF-8” is valid, but “UTF8” is not valid in an XML document’s declaration, even though Python accepts it as an encoding name. See https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml11-20060816/#NT-EncodingDecl and https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml.


Return a pretty-printed version of the document. indent specifies the indentation string and defaults to a tabulator; newl specifies the string emitted at the end of each line and defaults to \n.
The encoding argument behaves like the corresponding argument of toxml().
The standalone argument behaves exactly as in writexml().
Changed in version 3.8: The toprettyxml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Return a string or byte string containing the XML represented by the DOM node.
With an explicit encoding 1 argument, the result is a byte string in the specified encoding. With no encoding argument, the result is a Unicode string, and the XML declaration in the resulting string does not specify an encoding. Encoding this string in an encoding other than UTF-8 is likely incorrect, since UTF-8 is the default encoding of XML.
The standalone argument behaves exactly as in writexml().
Changed in version 3.8: The toxml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Break internal references within the DOM so that it will be garbage collected on versions of Python without cyclic GC. Even when cyclic GC is available, using this can make large amounts of memory available sooner, so calling this on DOM objects as soon as they are no longer needed is good practice. This only needs to be called on the Document object, but may be called on child nodes to discard children of that node.
You can avoid calling this method explicitly by using the with statement. The following code will automatically unlink dom when the with block is exited:


Write XML to the writer object. The writer receives texts but not bytes as input, it should have a write() method which matches that of the file object interface. The indent parameter is the indentation of the current node. The addindent parameter is the incremental indentation to use for subnodes of the current one. The newl parameter specifies the string to use to terminate newlines.
For the Document node, an additional keyword argument encoding can be used to specify the encoding field of the XML header.
Silimarly, explicitly stating the standalone argument causes the standalone document declarations to be added to the prologue of the XML document. If the value is set to True, standalone=”yes” is added, otherwise it is set to “no”. Not stating the argument will omit the declaration from the document.
Changed in version 3.8: The writexml() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Return a Document from the given input. filename_or_file may be either a file name, or a file-like object. parser, if given, must be a SAX2 parser object. This function will change the document handler of the parser and activate namespace support; other parser configuration (like setting an entity resolver) must have been done in advance.


Return a Document that represents the string. This method creates an io.StringIO object for the string and passes that on to parse().


Return an attribute with a particular index. The order you get the attributes in is arbitrary but will be consistent for the life of a DOM. Each item is an attribute node. Get its value with the value attribute.


If an attempt is made to change any object in a way that is not permitted with regard to the Namespaces in XML recommendation, this exception is raised.


This is raised if data is specified for a node which does not support data.


Add a new child node to this node at the end of the list of children, returning newChild. If the node was already in the tree, it is removed first.


A NamedNodeMap of attribute objects. Only elements have actual values for this; others provide None for this attribute. This is a read-only attribute.


A list of nodes contained within this node. This is a read-only attribute.


Clone this node. Setting deep means to clone all child nodes as well. This returns the clone.


The first child of the node, if there are any, or None. This is a read-only attribute.


Return True if the node has any attributes.


Return True if the node has any child nodes.


Insert a new child node before an existing child. It must be the case that refChild is a child of this node; if not, ValueError is raised. newChild is returned. If refChild is None, it inserts newChild at the end of the children’s list.


Return True if other refers to the same node as this node. This is especially useful for DOM implementations which use any sort of proxy architecture (because more than one object can refer to the same node).
Note
This is based on a proposed DOM Level 3 API which is still in the “working draft” stage, but this particular interface appears uncontroversial. Changes from the W3C will not necessarily affect this method in the Python DOM interface (though any new W3C API for this would also be supported).


The last child of the node, if there are any, or None. This is a read-only attribute.


The part of the tagName following the colon if there is one, else the entire tagName. The value is a string.


The namespace associated with the element name. This will be a string or None. This is a read-only attribute.


The node that immediately follows this one with the same parent. See also previousSibling. If this is the last child of the parent, this attribute will be None. This is a read-only attribute.


This has a different meaning for each node type; see the DOM specification for details. You can always get the information you would get here from another property such as the tagName property for elements or the name property for attributes. For all node types, the value of this attribute will be either a string or None. This is a read-only attribute.


An integer representing the node type. Symbolic constants for the types are on the Node object: ELEMENT_NODE, ATTRIBUTE_NODE, TEXT_NODE, CDATA_SECTION_NODE, ENTITY_NODE, PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE, COMMENT_NODE, DOCUMENT_NODE, DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE, NOTATION_NODE. This is a read-only attribute.


This has a different meaning for each node type; see the DOM specification for details. The situation is similar to that with nodeName. The value is a string or None.


Join adjacent text nodes so that all stretches of text are stored as single Text instances. This simplifies processing text from a DOM tree for many applications.


The parent of the current node, or None for the document node. The value is always a Node object or None. For Element nodes, this will be the parent element, except for the root element, in which case it will be the Document object. For Attr nodes, this is always None. This is a read-only attribute.


The part of the tagName preceding the colon if there is one, else the empty string. The value is a string, or None.


The node that immediately precedes this one with the same parent. For instance the element with an end-tag that comes just before the self element’s start-tag. Of course, XML documents are made up of more than just elements so the previous sibling could be text, a comment, or something else. If this node is the first child of the parent, this attribute will be None. This is a read-only attribute.


Remove a child node. oldChild must be a child of this node; if not, ValueError is raised. oldChild is returned on success. If oldChild will not be used further, its unlink() method should be called.


Replace an existing node with a new node. It must be the case that oldChild is a child of this node; if not, ValueError is raised.


Return the i’th item from the sequence, if there is one, or None. The index i is not allowed to be less than zero or greater than or equal to the length of the sequence.


Raised on attempts to modify an object where modifications are not allowed (such as for read-only nodes).


Exception when a node does not exist in the referenced context. For example, NamedNodeMap.removeNamedItem() will raise this if the node passed in does not exist in the map.


Raised when the implementation does not support the requested type of object or operation.


The content of the processing instruction following the first whitespace character.


The content of the processing instruction up to the first whitespace character. This is a read-only attribute.


Source code: Lib/xml/dom/pulldom.py
The xml.dom.pulldom module provides a “pull parser” which can also be asked to produce DOM-accessible fragments of the document where necessary. The basic concept involves pulling “events” from a stream of incoming XML and processing them. In contrast to SAX which also employs an event-driven processing model together with callbacks, the user of a pull parser is responsible for explicitly pulling events from the stream, looping over those events until either processing is finished or an error condition occurs.
Warning
The xml.dom.pulldom module is not secure against maliciously constructed data. If you need to parse untrusted or unauthenticated data see XML vulnerabilities.
Changed in version 3.7.1: The SAX parser no longer processes general external entities by default to increase security by default. To enable processing of external entities, pass a custom parser instance in:
Example:
event is a constant and can be one of:
node is an object of type xml.dom.minidom.Document, xml.dom.minidom.Element or xml.dom.minidom.Text.
Since the document is treated as a “flat” stream of events, the document “tree” is implicitly traversed and the desired elements are found regardless of their depth in the tree. In other words, one does not need to consider hierarchical issues such as recursive searching of the document nodes, although if the context of elements were important, one would either need to maintain some context-related state (i.e. remembering where one is in the document at any given point) or to make use of the DOMEventStream.expandNode() method and switch to DOM-related processing.
Subclass of xml.sax.handler.ContentHandler.
Subclass of xml.sax.handler.ContentHandler.
Return a DOMEventStream from the given input. stream_or_string may be either a file name, or a file-like object. parser, if given, must be an XMLReader object. This function will change the document handler of the parser and activate namespace support; other parser configuration (like setting an entity resolver) must have been done in advance.
If you have XML in a string, you can use the parseString() function instead:
Return a DOMEventStream that represents the (Unicode) string.
Default value for the bufsize parameter to parse().
The value of this variable can be changed before calling parse() and the new value will take effect.
Deprecated since version 3.8: Support for sequence protocol is deprecated.
Return a tuple containing event and the current node as xml.dom.minidom.Document if event equals START_DOCUMENT, xml.dom.minidom.Element if event equals START_ELEMENT or END_ELEMENT or xml.dom.minidom.Text if event equals CHARACTERS. The current node does not contain information about its children, unless expandNode() is called.
Expands all children of node into node. Example:


Default value for the bufsize parameter to parse().
The value of this variable can be changed before calling parse() and the new value will take effect.


Deprecated since version 3.8: Support for sequence protocol is deprecated.
Return a tuple containing event and the current node as xml.dom.minidom.Document if event equals START_DOCUMENT, xml.dom.minidom.Element if event equals START_ELEMENT or END_ELEMENT or xml.dom.minidom.Text if event equals CHARACTERS. The current node does not contain information about its children, unless expandNode() is called.
Expands all children of node into node. Example:


Expands all children of node into node. Example:


Return a tuple containing event and the current node as xml.dom.minidom.Document if event equals START_DOCUMENT, xml.dom.minidom.Element if event equals START_ELEMENT or END_ELEMENT or xml.dom.minidom.Text if event equals CHARACTERS. The current node does not contain information about its children, unless expandNode() is called.


Return a DOMEventStream from the given input. stream_or_string may be either a file name, or a file-like object. parser, if given, must be an XMLReader object. This function will change the document handler of the parser and activate namespace support; other parser configuration (like setting an entity resolver) must have been done in advance.


Return a DOMEventStream that represents the (Unicode) string.


Register the factory function with the name name. The factory function should return an object which implements the DOMImplementation interface. The factory function can return the same object every time, or a new one for each call, as appropriate for the specific implementation (e.g. if that implementation supports some customization).


Raised when an invalid or illegal string is specified.


The content of the text node as a string.


Raised when a node is inserted in a different document than it currently belongs to, and the implementation does not support migrating the node from one document to the other.


The URI of the XHTML namespace as defined by XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (section 3.1.1).


The namespace URI for namespace declarations, as defined by Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification (section 1.1.8).


The namespace URI associated with the reserved prefix xml, as defined by Namespaces in XML (section 4).


Source code: Lib/xml/etree/ElementTree.py
The xml.etree.ElementTree module implements a simple and efficient API for parsing and creating XML data.
Changed in version 3.3: This module will use a fast implementation whenever available.
Deprecated since version 3.3: The xml.etree.cElementTree module is deprecated.
Warning
The xml.etree.ElementTree module is not secure against maliciously constructed data. If you need to parse untrusted or unauthenticated data see XML vulnerabilities.
This is a short tutorial for using xml.etree.ElementTree (ET in short). The goal is to demonstrate some of the building blocks and basic concepts of the module.
XML is an inherently hierarchical data format, and the most natural way to represent it is with a tree. ET has two classes for this purpose - ElementTree represents the whole XML document as a tree, and Element represents a single node in this tree. Interactions with the whole document (reading and writing to/from files) are usually done on the ElementTree level. Interactions with a single XML element and its sub-elements are done on the Element level.
We’ll be using the following XML document as the sample data for this section:
We can import this data by reading from a file:
Or directly from a string:
fromstring() parses XML from a string directly into an Element, which is the root element of the parsed tree. Other parsing functions may create an ElementTree. Check the documentation to be sure.
As an Element, root has a tag and a dictionary of attributes:
It also has children nodes over which we can iterate:
Children are nested, and we can access specific child nodes by index:
Note
Not all elements of the XML input will end up as elements of the parsed tree. Currently, this module skips over any XML comments, processing instructions, and document type declarations in the input. Nevertheless, trees built using this module’s API rather than parsing from XML text can have comments and processing instructions in them; they will be included when generating XML output. A document type declaration may be accessed by passing a custom TreeBuilder instance to the XMLParser constructor.
Most parsing functions provided by this module require the whole document to be read at once before returning any result. It is possible to use an XMLParser and feed data into it incrementally, but it is a push API that calls methods on a callback target, which is too low-level and inconvenient for most needs. Sometimes what the user really wants is to be able to parse XML incrementally, without blocking operations, while enjoying the convenience of fully constructed Element objects.
The most powerful tool for doing this is XMLPullParser. It does not require a blocking read to obtain the XML data, and is instead fed with data incrementally with XMLPullParser.feed() calls. To get the parsed XML elements, call XMLPullParser.read_events(). Here is an example:
The obvious use case is applications that operate in a non-blocking fashion where the XML data is being received from a socket or read incrementally from some storage device. In such cases, blocking reads are unacceptable.
Because it’s so flexible, XMLPullParser can be inconvenient to use for simpler use-cases. If you don’t mind your application blocking on reading XML data but would still like to have incremental parsing capabilities, take a look at iterparse(). It can be useful when you’re reading a large XML document and don’t want to hold it wholly in memory.
Element has some useful methods that help iterate recursively over all the sub-tree below it (its children, their children, and so on). For example, Element.iter():
Element.findall() finds only elements with a tag which are direct children of the current element. Element.find() finds the first child with a particular tag, and Element.text accesses the element’s text content. Element.get() accesses the element’s attributes:
More sophisticated specification of which elements to look for is possible by using XPath.
ElementTree provides a simple way to build XML documents and write them to files. The ElementTree.write() method serves this purpose.
Once created, an Element object may be manipulated by directly changing its fields (such as Element.text), adding and modifying attributes (Element.set() method), as well as adding new children (for example with Element.append()).
Let’s say we want to add one to each country’s rank, and add an updated attribute to the rank element:
Our XML now looks like this:
We can remove elements using Element.remove(). Let’s say we want to remove all countries with a rank higher than 50:
Note that concurrent modification while iterating can lead to problems, just like when iterating and modifying Python lists or dicts. Therefore, the example first collects all matching elements with root.findall(), and only then iterates over the list of matches.
Our XML now looks like this:
The SubElement() function also provides a convenient way to create new sub-elements for a given element:
If the XML input has namespaces, tags and attributes with prefixes in the form prefix:sometag get expanded to {uri}sometag where the prefix is replaced by the full URI. Also, if there is a default namespace, that full URI gets prepended to all of the non-prefixed tags.
Here is an XML example that incorporates two namespaces, one with the prefix “fictional” and the other serving as the default namespace:
One way to search and explore this XML example is to manually add the URI to every tag or attribute in the xpath of a find() or findall():
A better way to search the namespaced XML example is to create a dictionary with your own prefixes and use those in the search functions:
These two approaches both output:
See http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm for tutorials and links to other docs.
This module provides limited support for XPath expressions for locating elements in a tree. The goal is to support a small subset of the abbreviated syntax; a full XPath engine is outside the scope of the module.
Here’s an example that demonstrates some of the XPath capabilities of the module. We’ll be using the countrydata XML document from the Parsing XML section:
For XML with namespaces, use the usual qualified {namespace}tag notation:
Syntax
Meaning
tag
Selects all child elements with the given tag. For example, spam selects all child elements named spam, and spam/egg selects all grandchildren named egg in all children named spam. {namespace}* selects all tags in the given namespace, {*}spam selects tags named spam in any (or no) namespace, and {}* only selects tags that are not in a namespace.
Changed in version 3.8: Support for star-wildcards was added.
*
Selects all child elements, including comments and processing instructions. For example, */egg selects all grandchildren named egg.
.
Selects the current node. This is mostly useful at the beginning of the path, to indicate that it’s a relative path.
//
Selects all subelements, on all levels beneath the current element. For example, .//egg selects all egg elements in the entire tree.
..
Selects the parent element. Returns None if the path attempts to reach the ancestors of the start element (the element find was called on).
[@attrib]
Selects all elements that have the given attribute.
[@attrib='value']
Selects all elements for which the given attribute has the given value. The value cannot contain quotes.
[tag]
Selects all elements that have a child named tag. Only immediate children are supported.
[.='text']
Selects all elements whose complete text content, including descendants, equals the given text.
New in version 3.7.
[tag='text']
Selects all elements that have a child named tag whose complete text content, including descendants, equals the given text.
[position]
Selects all elements that are located at the given position. The position can be either an integer (1 is the first position), the expression last() (for the last position), or a position relative to the last position (e.g. last()-1).
Predicates (expressions within square brackets) must be preceded by a tag name, an asterisk, or another predicate. position predicates must be preceded by a tag name.
C14N 2.0 transformation function.
Canonicalization is a way to normalise XML output in a way that allows byte-by-byte comparisons and digital signatures. It reduced the freedom that XML serializers have and instead generates a more constrained XML representation. The main restrictions regard the placement of namespace declarations, the ordering of attributes, and ignorable whitespace.
This function takes an XML data string (xml_data) or a file path or file-like object (from_file) as input, converts it to the canonical form, and writes it out using the out file(-like) object, if provided, or returns it as a text string if not. The output file receives text, not bytes. It should therefore be opened in text mode with utf-8 encoding.
Typical uses:
The configuration options are as follows:
(default: false)
(default: false)
should be replaced in text content (default: empty)
should be replaced in text content (default: empty)
In the option list above, “a set” refers to any collection or iterable of strings, no ordering is expected.
New in version 3.8.
Comment element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML comment by the standard serializer. The comment string can be either a bytestring or a Unicode string. text is a string containing the comment string. Returns an element instance representing a comment.
Note that XMLParser skips over comments in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. An ElementTree will only contain comment nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of the Element methods.
Writes an element tree or element structure to sys.stdout. This function should be used for debugging only.
The exact output format is implementation dependent. In this version, it’s written as an ordinary XML file.
elem is an element tree or an individual element.
Changed in version 3.8: The dump() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
Parses an XML section from a string constant. Same as XML(). text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.
Parses an XML document from a sequence of string fragments. sequence is a list or other sequence containing XML data fragments. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.
New in version 3.2.
Appends whitespace to the subtree to indent the tree visually. This can be used to generate pretty-printed XML output. tree can be an Element or ElementTree. space is the whitespace string that will be inserted for each indentation level, two space characters by default. For indenting partial subtrees inside of an already indented tree, pass the initial indentation level as level.
New in version 3.9.
Check if an object appears to be a valid element object. element is an element instance. Return True if this is an element object.
Parses an XML section into an element tree incrementally, and reports what’s going on to the user. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings "start", "end", "comment", "pi", "start-ns" and "end-ns" (the “ns” events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only "end" events are reported. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. parser must be a subclass of XMLParser and can only use the default TreeBuilder as a target. Returns an iterator providing (event, elem) pairs.
Note that while iterparse() builds the tree incrementally, it issues blocking reads on source (or the file it names). As such, it’s unsuitable for applications where blocking reads can’t be made. For fully non-blocking parsing, see XMLPullParser.
Note
iterparse() only guarantees that it has seen the “>” character of a starting tag when it emits a “start” event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.
If you need a fully populated element, look for “end” events instead.
Deprecated since version 3.4: The parser argument.
Changed in version 3.8: The comment and pi events were added.
Parses an XML section into an element tree. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an ElementTree instance.
PI element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML processing instruction. target is a string containing the PI target. text is a string containing the PI contents, if given. Returns an element instance, representing a processing instruction.
Note that XMLParser skips over processing instructions in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. An ElementTree will only contain processing instruction nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of the Element methods.
Registers a namespace prefix. The registry is global, and any existing mapping for either the given prefix or the namespace URI will be removed. prefix is a namespace prefix. uri is a namespace uri. Tags and attributes in this namespace will be serialized with the given prefix, if at all possible.
New in version 3.2.
Subelement factory. This function creates an element instance, and appends it to an existing element.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. parent is the parent element. tag is the subelement name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments. Returns an element instance.
Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an Element instance. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Use encoding="unicode" to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). xml_declaration, default_namespace and short_empty_elements has the same meaning as in ElementTree.write(). Returns an (optionally) encoded string containing the XML data.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
New in version 3.8: The xml_declaration and default_namespace parameters.
Changed in version 3.8: The tostring() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an Element instance. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Use encoding="unicode" to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). xml_declaration, default_namespace and short_empty_elements has the same meaning as in ElementTree.write(). Returns a list of (optionally) encoded strings containing the XML data. It does not guarantee any specific sequence, except that b"".join(tostringlist(element)) == tostring(element).
New in version 3.2.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
New in version 3.8: The xml_declaration and default_namespace parameters.
Changed in version 3.8: The tostringlist() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
Parses an XML section from a string constant. This function can be used to embed “XML literals” in Python code. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.
Parses an XML section from a string constant, and also returns a dictionary which maps from element id:s to elements. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns a tuple containing an Element instance and a dictionary.
This module provides limited support for XInclude directives, via the xml.etree.ElementInclude helper module. This module can be used to insert subtrees and text strings into element trees, based on information in the tree.
Here’s an example that demonstrates use of the XInclude module. To include an XML document in the current document, use the {http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude}include element and set the parse attribute to "xml", and use the href attribute to specify the document to include.
By default, the href attribute is treated as a file name. You can use custom loaders to override this behaviour. Also note that the standard helper does not support XPointer syntax.
To process this file, load it as usual, and pass the root element to the xml.etree.ElementTree module:
The ElementInclude module replaces the {http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude}include element with the root element from the source.xml document. The result might look something like this:
If the parse attribute is omitted, it defaults to “xml”. The href attribute is required.
To include a text document, use the {http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude}include element, and set the parse attribute to “text”:
The result might look something like:
Default loader. This default loader reads an included resource from disk. href is a URL. parse is for parse mode either “xml” or “text”. encoding is an optional text encoding. If not given, encoding is utf-8. Returns the expanded resource. If the parse mode is "xml", this is an ElementTree instance. If the parse mode is “text”, this is a Unicode string. If the loader fails, it can return None or raise an exception.
This function expands XInclude directives. elem is the root element. loader is an optional resource loader. If omitted, it defaults to default_loader(). If given, it should be a callable that implements the same interface as default_loader(). base_url is base URL of the original file, to resolve relative include file references. max_depth is the maximum number of recursive inclusions. Limited to reduce the risk of malicious content explosion. Pass a negative value to disable the limitation.
Returns the expanded resource. If the parse mode is "xml", this is an ElementTree instance. If the parse mode is “text”, this is a Unicode string. If the loader fails, it can return None or raise an exception.
New in version 3.9: The base_url and max_depth parameters.
Element class. This class defines the Element interface, and provides a reference implementation of this interface.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. tag is the element name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments.
A string identifying what kind of data this element represents (the element type, in other words).
These attributes can be used to hold additional data associated with the element. Their values are usually strings but may be any application-specific object. If the element is created from an XML file, the text attribute holds either the text between the element’s start tag and its first child or end tag, or None, and the tail attribute holds either the text between the element’s end tag and the next tag, or None. For the XML data
the a element has None for both text and tail attributes, the b element has text "1" and tail "4", the c element has text "2" and tail None, and the d element has text None and tail "3".
To collect the inner text of an element, see itertext(), for example "".join(element.itertext()).
Applications may store arbitrary objects in these attributes.
A dictionary containing the element’s attributes. Note that while the attrib value is always a real mutable Python dictionary, an ElementTree implementation may choose to use another internal representation, and create the dictionary only if someone asks for it. To take advantage of such implementations, use the dictionary methods below whenever possible.
The following dictionary-like methods work on the element attributes.
Resets an element. This function removes all subelements, clears all attributes, and sets the text and tail attributes to None.
Gets the element attribute named key.
Returns the attribute value, or default if the attribute was not found.
Returns the element attributes as a sequence of (name, value) pairs. The attributes are returned in an arbitrary order.
Returns the elements attribute names as a list. The names are returned in an arbitrary order.
Set the attribute key on the element to value.
The following methods work on the element’s children (subelements).
Adds the element subelement to the end of this element’s internal list of subelements. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.
Appends subelements from a sequence object with zero or more elements. Raises TypeError if a subelement is not an Element.
New in version 3.2.
Finds the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns an element instance or None. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns a list containing all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Finds text for the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns the text content of the first matching element, or default if no element was found. Note that if the matching element has no text content an empty string is returned. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Inserts subelement at the given position in this element. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.
Creates a tree iterator with the current element as the root. The iterator iterates over this element and all elements below it, in document (depth first) order. If tag is not None or '*', only elements whose tag equals tag are returned from the iterator. If the tree structure is modified during iteration, the result is undefined.
New in version 3.2.
Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns an iterable yielding all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
New in version 3.2.
Creates a text iterator. The iterator loops over this element and all subelements, in document order, and returns all inner text.
New in version 3.2.
Creates a new element object of the same type as this element. Do not call this method, use the SubElement() factory function instead.
Removes subelement from the element. Unlike the find* methods this method compares elements based on the instance identity, not on tag value or contents.
Element objects also support the following sequence type methods for working with subelements: __delitem__(), __getitem__(), __setitem__(), __len__().
Caution: Elements with no subelements will test as False. This behavior will change in future versions. Use specific len(elem) or elem is
None test instead.
Prior to Python 3.8, the serialisation order of the XML attributes of elements was artificially made predictable by sorting the attributes by their name. Based on the now guaranteed ordering of dicts, this arbitrary reordering was removed in Python 3.8 to preserve the order in which attributes were originally parsed or created by user code.
In general, user code should try not to depend on a specific ordering of attributes, given that the XML Information Set explicitly excludes the attribute order from conveying information. Code should be prepared to deal with any ordering on input. In cases where deterministic XML output is required, e.g. for cryptographic signing or test data sets, canonical serialisation is available with the canonicalize() function.
In cases where canonical output is not applicable but a specific attribute order is still desirable on output, code should aim for creating the attributes directly in the desired order, to avoid perceptual mismatches for readers of the code. In cases where this is difficult to achieve, a recipe like the following can be applied prior to serialisation to enforce an order independently from the Element creation:
ElementTree wrapper class. This class represents an entire element hierarchy, and adds some extra support for serialization to and from standard XML.
element is the root element. The tree is initialized with the contents of the XML file if given.
Replaces the root element for this tree. This discards the current contents of the tree, and replaces it with the given element. Use with care. element is an element instance.
Same as Element.find(), starting at the root of the tree.
Same as Element.findall(), starting at the root of the tree.
Same as Element.findtext(), starting at the root of the tree.
Returns the root element for this tree.
Creates and returns a tree iterator for the root element. The iterator loops over all elements in this tree, in section order. tag is the tag to look for (default is to return all elements).
Same as Element.iterfind(), starting at the root of the tree.
New in version 3.2.
Loads an external XML section into this element tree. source is a file name or file object. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns the section root element.
Writes the element tree to a file, as XML. file is a file name, or a file object opened for writing. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). xml_declaration controls if an XML declaration should be added to the file. Use False for never, True for always, None for only if not US-ASCII or UTF-8 or Unicode (default is None). default_namespace sets the default XML namespace (for “xmlns”). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). The keyword-only short_empty_elements parameter controls the formatting of elements that contain no content. If True (the default), they are emitted as a single self-closed tag, otherwise they are emitted as a pair of start/end tags.
The output is either a string (str) or binary (bytes). This is controlled by the encoding argument. If encoding is "unicode", the output is a string; otherwise, it’s binary. Note that this may conflict with the type of file if it’s an open file object; make sure you do not try to write a string to a binary stream and vice versa.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
Changed in version 3.8: The write() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.
This is the XML file that is going to be manipulated:
Example of changing the attribute “target” of every link in first paragraph:
QName wrapper. This can be used to wrap a QName attribute value, in order to get proper namespace handling on output. text_or_uri is a string containing the QName value, in the form {uri}local, or, if the tag argument is given, the URI part of a QName. If tag is given, the first argument is interpreted as a URI, and this argument is interpreted as a local name. QName instances are opaque.
Generic element structure builder. This builder converts a sequence of start, data, end, comment and pi method calls to a well-formed element structure. You can use this class to build an element structure using a custom XML parser, or a parser for some other XML-like format.
element_factory, when given, must be a callable accepting two positional arguments: a tag and a dict of attributes. It is expected to return a new element instance.
The comment_factory and pi_factory functions, when given, should behave like the Comment() and ProcessingInstruction() functions to create comments and processing instructions. When not given, the default factories will be used. When insert_comments and/or insert_pis is true, comments/pis will be inserted into the tree if they appear within the root element (but not outside of it).
Flushes the builder buffers, and returns the toplevel document element. Returns an Element instance.
Adds text to the current element. data is a string. This should be either a bytestring, or a Unicode string.
Closes the current element. tag is the element name. Returns the closed element.
Opens a new element. tag is the element name. attrs is a dictionary containing element attributes. Returns the opened element.
Creates a comment with the given text. If insert_comments is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.
Creates a comment with the given target name and text. If insert_pis is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.
In addition, a custom TreeBuilder object can provide the following methods:
Handles a doctype declaration. name is the doctype name. pubid is the public identifier. system is the system identifier. This method does not exist on the default TreeBuilder class.
New in version 3.2.
Is called whenever the parser encounters a new namespace declaration, before the start() callback for the opening element that defines it. prefix is '' for the default namespace and the declared namespace prefix name otherwise. uri is the namespace URI.
New in version 3.8.
Is called after the end() callback of an element that declared a namespace prefix mapping, with the name of the prefix that went out of scope.
New in version 3.8.
A C14N 2.0 writer. Arguments are the same as for the canonicalize() function. This class does not build a tree but translates the callback events directly into a serialised form using the write function.
New in version 3.8.
This class is the low-level building block of the module. It uses xml.parsers.expat for efficient, event-based parsing of XML. It can be fed XML data incrementally with the feed() method, and parsing events are translated to a push API - by invoking callbacks on the target object. If target is omitted, the standard TreeBuilder is used. If encoding 1 is given, the value overrides the encoding specified in the XML file.
Changed in version 3.8: Parameters are now keyword-only. The html argument no longer supported.
Finishes feeding data to the parser. Returns the result of calling the close() method of the target passed during construction; by default, this is the toplevel document element.
Feeds data to the parser. data is encoded data.
XMLParser.feed() calls target’s start(tag, attrs_dict) method for each opening tag, its end(tag) method for each closing tag, and data is processed by method data(data). For further supported callback methods, see the TreeBuilder class. XMLParser.close() calls target’s method close(). XMLParser can be used not only for building a tree structure. This is an example of counting the maximum depth of an XML file:
A pull parser suitable for non-blocking applications. Its input-side API is similar to that of XMLParser, but instead of pushing calls to a callback target, XMLPullParser collects an internal list of parsing events and lets the user read from it. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings "start", "end", "comment", "pi", "start-ns" and "end-ns" (the “ns” events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only "end" events are reported.
Feed the given bytes data to the parser.
Signal the parser that the data stream is terminated. Unlike XMLParser.close(), this method always returns None. Any events not yet retrieved when the parser is closed can still be read with read_events().
Return an iterator over the events which have been encountered in the data fed to the parser. The iterator yields (event, elem) pairs, where event is a string representing the type of event (e.g. "end") and elem is the encountered Element object, or other context value as follows.
Events provided in a previous call to read_events() will not be yielded again. Events are consumed from the internal queue only when they are retrieved from the iterator, so multiple readers iterating in parallel over iterators obtained from read_events() will have unpredictable results.
Note
XMLPullParser only guarantees that it has seen the “>” character of a starting tag when it emits a “start” event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.
If you need a fully populated element, look for “end” events instead.
New in version 3.4.
Changed in version 3.8: The comment and pi events were added.
XML parse error, raised by the various parsing methods in this module when parsing fails. The string representation of an instance of this exception will contain a user-friendly error message. In addition, it will have the following attributes available:
A numeric error code from the expat parser. See the documentation of xml.parsers.expat for the list of error codes and their meanings.
A tuple of line, column numbers, specifying where the error occurred.
The encoding string included in XML output should conform to the appropriate standards. For example, “UTF-8” is valid, but “UTF8” is not. See https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml11-20060816/#NT-EncodingDecl and https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml.


A C14N 2.0 writer. Arguments are the same as for the canonicalize() function. This class does not build a tree but translates the callback events directly into a serialised form using the write function.
New in version 3.8.


C14N 2.0 transformation function.
Canonicalization is a way to normalise XML output in a way that allows byte-by-byte comparisons and digital signatures. It reduced the freedom that XML serializers have and instead generates a more constrained XML representation. The main restrictions regard the placement of namespace declarations, the ordering of attributes, and ignorable whitespace.
This function takes an XML data string (xml_data) or a file path or file-like object (from_file) as input, converts it to the canonical form, and writes it out using the out file(-like) object, if provided, or returns it as a text string if not. The output file receives text, not bytes. It should therefore be opened in text mode with utf-8 encoding.
Typical uses:
The configuration options are as follows:
(default: false)
(default: false)
should be replaced in text content (default: empty)
should be replaced in text content (default: empty)
In the option list above, “a set” refers to any collection or iterable of strings, no ordering is expected.
New in version 3.8.


Comment element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML comment by the standard serializer. The comment string can be either a bytestring or a Unicode string. text is a string containing the comment string. Returns an element instance representing a comment.
Note that XMLParser skips over comments in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. An ElementTree will only contain comment nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of the Element methods.


Writes an element tree or element structure to sys.stdout. This function should be used for debugging only.
The exact output format is implementation dependent. In this version, it’s written as an ordinary XML file.
elem is an element tree or an individual element.
Changed in version 3.8: The dump() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Element class. This class defines the Element interface, and provides a reference implementation of this interface.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. tag is the element name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments.
A string identifying what kind of data this element represents (the element type, in other words).
These attributes can be used to hold additional data associated with the element. Their values are usually strings but may be any application-specific object. If the element is created from an XML file, the text attribute holds either the text between the element’s start tag and its first child or end tag, or None, and the tail attribute holds either the text between the element’s end tag and the next tag, or None. For the XML data
the a element has None for both text and tail attributes, the b element has text "1" and tail "4", the c element has text "2" and tail None, and the d element has text None and tail "3".
To collect the inner text of an element, see itertext(), for example "".join(element.itertext()).
Applications may store arbitrary objects in these attributes.
A dictionary containing the element’s attributes. Note that while the attrib value is always a real mutable Python dictionary, an ElementTree implementation may choose to use another internal representation, and create the dictionary only if someone asks for it. To take advantage of such implementations, use the dictionary methods below whenever possible.
The following dictionary-like methods work on the element attributes.
Resets an element. This function removes all subelements, clears all attributes, and sets the text and tail attributes to None.
Gets the element attribute named key.
Returns the attribute value, or default if the attribute was not found.
Returns the element attributes as a sequence of (name, value) pairs. The attributes are returned in an arbitrary order.
Returns the elements attribute names as a list. The names are returned in an arbitrary order.
Set the attribute key on the element to value.
The following methods work on the element’s children (subelements).
Adds the element subelement to the end of this element’s internal list of subelements. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.
Appends subelements from a sequence object with zero or more elements. Raises TypeError if a subelement is not an Element.
New in version 3.2.
Finds the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns an element instance or None. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns a list containing all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Finds text for the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns the text content of the first matching element, or default if no element was found. Note that if the matching element has no text content an empty string is returned. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.
Inserts subelement at the given position in this element. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.
Creates a tree iterator with the current element as the root. The iterator iterates over this element and all elements below it, in document (depth first) order. If tag is not None or '*', only elements whose tag equals tag are returned from the iterator. If the tree structure is modified during iteration, the result is undefined.
New in version 3.2.
Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns an iterable yielding all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
New in version 3.2.
Creates a text iterator. The iterator loops over this element and all subelements, in document order, and returns all inner text.
New in version 3.2.
Creates a new element object of the same type as this element. Do not call this method, use the SubElement() factory function instead.
Removes subelement from the element. Unlike the find* methods this method compares elements based on the instance identity, not on tag value or contents.
Element objects also support the following sequence type methods for working with subelements: __delitem__(), __getitem__(), __setitem__(), __len__().
Caution: Elements with no subelements will test as False. This behavior will change in future versions. Use specific len(elem) or elem is
None test instead.
Prior to Python 3.8, the serialisation order of the XML attributes of elements was artificially made predictable by sorting the attributes by their name. Based on the now guaranteed ordering of dicts, this arbitrary reordering was removed in Python 3.8 to preserve the order in which attributes were originally parsed or created by user code.
In general, user code should try not to depend on a specific ordering of attributes, given that the XML Information Set explicitly excludes the attribute order from conveying information. Code should be prepared to deal with any ordering on input. In cases where deterministic XML output is required, e.g. for cryptographic signing or test data sets, canonical serialisation is available with the canonicalize() function.
In cases where canonical output is not applicable but a specific attribute order is still desirable on output, code should aim for creating the attributes directly in the desired order, to avoid perceptual mismatches for readers of the code. In cases where this is difficult to achieve, a recipe like the following can be applied prior to serialisation to enforce an order independently from the Element creation:


Adds the element subelement to the end of this element’s internal list of subelements. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.


A dictionary containing the element’s attributes. Note that while the attrib value is always a real mutable Python dictionary, an ElementTree implementation may choose to use another internal representation, and create the dictionary only if someone asks for it. To take advantage of such implementations, use the dictionary methods below whenever possible.


Resets an element. This function removes all subelements, clears all attributes, and sets the text and tail attributes to None.


Appends subelements from a sequence object with zero or more elements. Raises TypeError if a subelement is not an Element.
New in version 3.2.


Finds the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns an element instance or None. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.


Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns a list containing all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.


Finds text for the first subelement matching match. match may be a tag name or a path. Returns the text content of the first matching element, or default if no element was found. Note that if the matching element has no text content an empty string is returned. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name. Pass '' as prefix to move all unprefixed tag names in the expression into the given namespace.


Gets the element attribute named key.
Returns the attribute value, or default if the attribute was not found.


Inserts subelement at the given position in this element. Raises TypeError if subelement is not an Element.


Returns the element attributes as a sequence of (name, value) pairs. The attributes are returned in an arbitrary order.


Creates a tree iterator with the current element as the root. The iterator iterates over this element and all elements below it, in document (depth first) order. If tag is not None or '*', only elements whose tag equals tag are returned from the iterator. If the tree structure is modified during iteration, the result is undefined.
New in version 3.2.


Finds all matching subelements, by tag name or path. Returns an iterable yielding all matching elements in document order. namespaces is an optional mapping from namespace prefix to full name.
New in version 3.2.


Creates a text iterator. The iterator loops over this element and all subelements, in document order, and returns all inner text.
New in version 3.2.


Returns the elements attribute names as a list. The names are returned in an arbitrary order.


Creates a new element object of the same type as this element. Do not call this method, use the SubElement() factory function instead.


Removes subelement from the element. Unlike the find* methods this method compares elements based on the instance identity, not on tag value or contents.


Set the attribute key on the element to value.


A string identifying what kind of data this element represents (the element type, in other words).


These attributes can be used to hold additional data associated with the element. Their values are usually strings but may be any application-specific object. If the element is created from an XML file, the text attribute holds either the text between the element’s start tag and its first child or end tag, or None, and the tail attribute holds either the text between the element’s end tag and the next tag, or None. For the XML data
the a element has None for both text and tail attributes, the b element has text "1" and tail "4", the c element has text "2" and tail None, and the d element has text None and tail "3".
To collect the inner text of an element, see itertext(), for example "".join(element.itertext()).
Applications may store arbitrary objects in these attributes.


ElementTree wrapper class. This class represents an entire element hierarchy, and adds some extra support for serialization to and from standard XML.
element is the root element. The tree is initialized with the contents of the XML file if given.
Replaces the root element for this tree. This discards the current contents of the tree, and replaces it with the given element. Use with care. element is an element instance.
Same as Element.find(), starting at the root of the tree.
Same as Element.findall(), starting at the root of the tree.
Same as Element.findtext(), starting at the root of the tree.
Returns the root element for this tree.
Creates and returns a tree iterator for the root element. The iterator loops over all elements in this tree, in section order. tag is the tag to look for (default is to return all elements).
Same as Element.iterfind(), starting at the root of the tree.
New in version 3.2.
Loads an external XML section into this element tree. source is a file name or file object. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns the section root element.
Writes the element tree to a file, as XML. file is a file name, or a file object opened for writing. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). xml_declaration controls if an XML declaration should be added to the file. Use False for never, True for always, None for only if not US-ASCII or UTF-8 or Unicode (default is None). default_namespace sets the default XML namespace (for “xmlns”). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). The keyword-only short_empty_elements parameter controls the formatting of elements that contain no content. If True (the default), they are emitted as a single self-closed tag, otherwise they are emitted as a pair of start/end tags.
The output is either a string (str) or binary (bytes). This is controlled by the encoding argument. If encoding is "unicode", the output is a string; otherwise, it’s binary. Note that this may conflict with the type of file if it’s an open file object; make sure you do not try to write a string to a binary stream and vice versa.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
Changed in version 3.8: The write() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Same as Element.find(), starting at the root of the tree.


Same as Element.findall(), starting at the root of the tree.


Same as Element.findtext(), starting at the root of the tree.


Creates and returns a tree iterator for the root element. The iterator loops over all elements in this tree, in section order. tag is the tag to look for (default is to return all elements).


Same as Element.iterfind(), starting at the root of the tree.
New in version 3.2.


Loads an external XML section into this element tree. source is a file name or file object. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns the section root element.


Writes the element tree to a file, as XML. file is a file name, or a file object opened for writing. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). xml_declaration controls if an XML declaration should be added to the file. Use False for never, True for always, None for only if not US-ASCII or UTF-8 or Unicode (default is None). default_namespace sets the default XML namespace (for “xmlns”). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). The keyword-only short_empty_elements parameter controls the formatting of elements that contain no content. If True (the default), they are emitted as a single self-closed tag, otherwise they are emitted as a pair of start/end tags.
The output is either a string (str) or binary (bytes). This is controlled by the encoding argument. If encoding is "unicode", the output is a string; otherwise, it’s binary. Note that this may conflict with the type of file if it’s an open file object; make sure you do not try to write a string to a binary stream and vice versa.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
Changed in version 3.8: The write() method now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Replaces the root element for this tree. This discards the current contents of the tree, and replaces it with the given element. Use with care. element is an element instance.


Parses an XML section from a string constant. Same as XML(). text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.


Parses an XML document from a sequence of string fragments. sequence is a list or other sequence containing XML data fragments. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.
New in version 3.2.


Appends whitespace to the subtree to indent the tree visually. This can be used to generate pretty-printed XML output. tree can be an Element or ElementTree. space is the whitespace string that will be inserted for each indentation level, two space characters by default. For indenting partial subtrees inside of an already indented tree, pass the initial indentation level as level.
New in version 3.9.


Check if an object appears to be a valid element object. element is an element instance. Return True if this is an element object.


Parses an XML section into an element tree incrementally, and reports what’s going on to the user. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings "start", "end", "comment", "pi", "start-ns" and "end-ns" (the “ns” events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only "end" events are reported. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. parser must be a subclass of XMLParser and can only use the default TreeBuilder as a target. Returns an iterator providing (event, elem) pairs.
Note that while iterparse() builds the tree incrementally, it issues blocking reads on source (or the file it names). As such, it’s unsuitable for applications where blocking reads can’t be made. For fully non-blocking parsing, see XMLPullParser.
Note
iterparse() only guarantees that it has seen the “>” character of a starting tag when it emits a “start” event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.
If you need a fully populated element, look for “end” events instead.
Deprecated since version 3.4: The parser argument.
Changed in version 3.8: The comment and pi events were added.


Parses an XML section into an element tree. source is a filename or file object containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an ElementTree instance.


XML parse error, raised by the various parsing methods in this module when parsing fails. The string representation of an instance of this exception will contain a user-friendly error message. In addition, it will have the following attributes available:
A numeric error code from the expat parser. See the documentation of xml.parsers.expat for the list of error codes and their meanings.
A tuple of line, column numbers, specifying where the error occurred.


A numeric error code from the expat parser. See the documentation of xml.parsers.expat for the list of error codes and their meanings.


A tuple of line, column numbers, specifying where the error occurred.


PI element factory. This factory function creates a special element that will be serialized as an XML processing instruction. target is a string containing the PI target. text is a string containing the PI contents, if given. Returns an element instance, representing a processing instruction.
Note that XMLParser skips over processing instructions in the input instead of creating comment objects for them. An ElementTree will only contain processing instruction nodes if they have been inserted into to the tree using one of the Element methods.


QName wrapper. This can be used to wrap a QName attribute value, in order to get proper namespace handling on output. text_or_uri is a string containing the QName value, in the form {uri}local, or, if the tag argument is given, the URI part of a QName. If tag is given, the first argument is interpreted as a URI, and this argument is interpreted as a local name. QName instances are opaque.


Registers a namespace prefix. The registry is global, and any existing mapping for either the given prefix or the namespace URI will be removed. prefix is a namespace prefix. uri is a namespace uri. Tags and attributes in this namespace will be serialized with the given prefix, if at all possible.
New in version 3.2.


Subelement factory. This function creates an element instance, and appends it to an existing element.
The element name, attribute names, and attribute values can be either bytestrings or Unicode strings. parent is the parent element. tag is the subelement name. attrib is an optional dictionary, containing element attributes. extra contains additional attributes, given as keyword arguments. Returns an element instance.


Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an Element instance. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Use encoding="unicode" to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). xml_declaration, default_namespace and short_empty_elements has the same meaning as in ElementTree.write(). Returns an (optionally) encoded string containing the XML data.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
New in version 3.8: The xml_declaration and default_namespace parameters.
Changed in version 3.8: The tostring() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an Element instance. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Use encoding="unicode" to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). xml_declaration, default_namespace and short_empty_elements has the same meaning as in ElementTree.write(). Returns a list of (optionally) encoded strings containing the XML data. It does not guarantee any specific sequence, except that b"".join(tostringlist(element)) == tostring(element).
New in version 3.2.
New in version 3.4: The short_empty_elements parameter.
New in version 3.8: The xml_declaration and default_namespace parameters.
Changed in version 3.8: The tostringlist() function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user.


Generic element structure builder. This builder converts a sequence of start, data, end, comment and pi method calls to a well-formed element structure. You can use this class to build an element structure using a custom XML parser, or a parser for some other XML-like format.
element_factory, when given, must be a callable accepting two positional arguments: a tag and a dict of attributes. It is expected to return a new element instance.
The comment_factory and pi_factory functions, when given, should behave like the Comment() and ProcessingInstruction() functions to create comments and processing instructions. When not given, the default factories will be used. When insert_comments and/or insert_pis is true, comments/pis will be inserted into the tree if they appear within the root element (but not outside of it).
Flushes the builder buffers, and returns the toplevel document element. Returns an Element instance.
Adds text to the current element. data is a string. This should be either a bytestring, or a Unicode string.
Closes the current element. tag is the element name. Returns the closed element.
Opens a new element. tag is the element name. attrs is a dictionary containing element attributes. Returns the opened element.
Creates a comment with the given text. If insert_comments is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.
Creates a comment with the given target name and text. If insert_pis is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.
In addition, a custom TreeBuilder object can provide the following methods:
Handles a doctype declaration. name is the doctype name. pubid is the public identifier. system is the system identifier. This method does not exist on the default TreeBuilder class.
New in version 3.2.
Is called whenever the parser encounters a new namespace declaration, before the start() callback for the opening element that defines it. prefix is '' for the default namespace and the declared namespace prefix name otherwise. uri is the namespace URI.
New in version 3.8.
Is called after the end() callback of an element that declared a namespace prefix mapping, with the name of the prefix that went out of scope.
New in version 3.8.


Flushes the builder buffers, and returns the toplevel document element. Returns an Element instance.


Creates a comment with the given text. If insert_comments is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.


Adds text to the current element. data is a string. This should be either a bytestring, or a Unicode string.


Handles a doctype declaration. name is the doctype name. pubid is the public identifier. system is the system identifier. This method does not exist on the default TreeBuilder class.
New in version 3.2.


Closes the current element. tag is the element name. Returns the closed element.


Is called after the end() callback of an element that declared a namespace prefix mapping, with the name of the prefix that went out of scope.
New in version 3.8.


Creates a comment with the given target name and text. If insert_pis is true, this will also add it to the tree.
New in version 3.8.


Opens a new element. tag is the element name. attrs is a dictionary containing element attributes. Returns the opened element.


Is called whenever the parser encounters a new namespace declaration, before the start() callback for the opening element that defines it. prefix is '' for the default namespace and the declared namespace prefix name otherwise. uri is the namespace URI.
New in version 3.8.


Parses an XML section from a string constant. This function can be used to embed “XML literals” in Python code. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns an Element instance.


Default loader. This default loader reads an included resource from disk. href is a URL. parse is for parse mode either “xml” or “text”. encoding is an optional text encoding. If not given, encoding is utf-8. Returns the expanded resource. If the parse mode is "xml", this is an ElementTree instance. If the parse mode is “text”, this is a Unicode string. If the loader fails, it can return None or raise an exception.


This function expands XInclude directives. elem is the root element. loader is an optional resource loader. If omitted, it defaults to default_loader(). If given, it should be a callable that implements the same interface as default_loader(). base_url is base URL of the original file, to resolve relative include file references. max_depth is the maximum number of recursive inclusions. Limited to reduce the risk of malicious content explosion. Pass a negative value to disable the limitation.
Returns the expanded resource. If the parse mode is "xml", this is an ElementTree instance. If the parse mode is “text”, this is a Unicode string. If the loader fails, it can return None or raise an exception.
New in version 3.9: The base_url and max_depth parameters.


Parses an XML section from a string constant, and also returns a dictionary which maps from element id:s to elements. text is a string containing XML data. parser is an optional parser instance. If not given, the standard XMLParser parser is used. Returns a tuple containing an Element instance and a dictionary.


This class is the low-level building block of the module. It uses xml.parsers.expat for efficient, event-based parsing of XML. It can be fed XML data incrementally with the feed() method, and parsing events are translated to a push API - by invoking callbacks on the target object. If target is omitted, the standard TreeBuilder is used. If encoding 1 is given, the value overrides the encoding specified in the XML file.
Changed in version 3.8: Parameters are now keyword-only. The html argument no longer supported.
Finishes feeding data to the parser. Returns the result of calling the close() method of the target passed during construction; by default, this is the toplevel document element.
Feeds data to the parser. data is encoded data.
XMLParser.feed() calls target’s start(tag, attrs_dict) method for each opening tag, its end(tag) method for each closing tag, and data is processed by method data(data). For further supported callback methods, see the TreeBuilder class. XMLParser.close() calls target’s method close(). XMLParser can be used not only for building a tree structure. This is an example of counting the maximum depth of an XML file:


Finishes feeding data to the parser. Returns the result of calling the close() method of the target passed during construction; by default, this is the toplevel document element.


Feeds data to the parser. data is encoded data.


A pull parser suitable for non-blocking applications. Its input-side API is similar to that of XMLParser, but instead of pushing calls to a callback target, XMLPullParser collects an internal list of parsing events and lets the user read from it. events is a sequence of events to report back. The supported events are the strings "start", "end", "comment", "pi", "start-ns" and "end-ns" (the “ns” events are used to get detailed namespace information). If events is omitted, only "end" events are reported.
Feed the given bytes data to the parser.
Signal the parser that the data stream is terminated. Unlike XMLParser.close(), this method always returns None. Any events not yet retrieved when the parser is closed can still be read with read_events().
Return an iterator over the events which have been encountered in the data fed to the parser. The iterator yields (event, elem) pairs, where event is a string representing the type of event (e.g. "end") and elem is the encountered Element object, or other context value as follows.
Events provided in a previous call to read_events() will not be yielded again. Events are consumed from the internal queue only when they are retrieved from the iterator, so multiple readers iterating in parallel over iterators obtained from read_events() will have unpredictable results.
Note
XMLPullParser only guarantees that it has seen the “>” character of a starting tag when it emits a “start” event, so the attributes are defined, but the contents of the text and tail attributes are undefined at that point. The same applies to the element children; they may or may not be present.
If you need a fully populated element, look for “end” events instead.
New in version 3.4.
Changed in version 3.8: The comment and pi events were added.


Signal the parser that the data stream is terminated. Unlike XMLParser.close(), this method always returns None. Any events not yet retrieved when the parser is closed can still be read with read_events().


Feed the given bytes data to the parser.


Return an iterator over the events which have been encountered in the data fed to the parser. The iterator yields (event, elem) pairs, where event is a string representing the type of event (e.g. "end") and elem is the encountered Element object, or other context value as follows.
Events provided in a previous call to read_events() will not be yielded again. Events are consumed from the internal queue only when they are retrieved from the iterator, so multiple readers iterating in parallel over iterators obtained from read_events() will have unpredictable results.