Alan Meyer, 05.01.2011 06:57:
I'm having some trouble inserting elements where I want them
using the lxml ElementTree (Python 2.6). I presume I'm making
some wrong assumptions about how lxml works and I'm hoping
someone can clue me in.
I want to process an xml document as follows:
For every occurrence of a particular element, no matter where it
appears in the tree, I want to add a sibling to that element with
the same name and a different value.
Here's the smallest artificial example I've found so far
demonstrates the problem:
<foo>
<whatever>
<something/>
</whatever>
<bingo>Add another bingo after this</bingo>
<bar/>
</foo>
What I'd like to produce is this:
<foo>
<whatever>
<something/>
</whatever>
<bingo>Add another bingo after this</bingo>
<bar/>
</foo>
Looks trivial to me. ;)
Here's my program:
-------- cut here -----
from lxml import etree as etree
xml = """<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<foo>
<whatever>
<something/>
</whatever>
<bingo>Add another bingo after this</bingo>
<bar/>
</foo>
"""
tree = etree.fromstring(xml)
# A list of all "bingo" element objects in the unmodified original xml
# There's only one in this example
elems = tree.xpath("//bingo")
# For each one, insert a sibling after it
bingoCounter = 0
for elem in elems:
parent = elem.getparent()
subIter = parent.iter()
".iter()" gives you a recursive iterator that will also yield the
"something" Element in your case, thus the incorrect counting. You only
want the children, so you should iterate over the Element itself.
pos = 0
for subElem in subIter:
# Is it one we want to create a sibling for?
if subElem == elem:
There is an .index() method on Elements that does what you want to achieve
here. However, the right way to do it is to use ".addnext()".
http://codespeak.net/lxml/api/lxml.etree._Element-class.html
Stefan
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