Home retrieving xml element value by searching the element by substring in its name

Questions

retrieving xml element value by searching the element by substring in its name

January 11, 2023

I would need to retrieve xml element value by searching the element by substring in its name, eg. I would need to get value for all elements in XML file which names contains client.

I found a way how to find element with xpath by an attribute, but I haven’t find a way for element name.

>Solution :

If you’re really using lxml (you have the question tagged both lxml and elementtree), you can use the xpath function contains() in a predicate…

from lxml import etree

xml = """
<doc>
    <client1>foo</client1>
    <some_client>bar</some_client>
</doc>
"""

root = etree.fromstring(xml)

for elem in root.xpath("//*[contains(name(),'client')]"):
    print(f"{elem.tag}: {elem.text}")

printed output…

client1: foo
some_client: bar

ElementTree only has limited xpath support, so one option is to check the name of the element using the .tag property…

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

xml = """
<doc>
    <client1>foo</client1>
    <some_client>bar</some_client>
</doc>
"""

root = etree.fromstring(xml)

for elem in root.iter():
    if "client" in elem.tag:
        print(f"{elem.tag}: {elem.text}")

This produces the same printed output above.