How to manipulate xml based on the specific tags?

Question

There’s an XML something like this

    <OUTER>
            <TYPE>FIRST</TYPE>
            <FIELD1>1</FIELD1>
            <ID>55056</ID>
            <TASK>
                <FILE>
                    <OPTIONS>1</OPTIONS>
                </FILE>
            </TASK>
    </OUTER>
    <OUTER>
                <TYPE>SECOND</TYPE>
                <FIELD1>2</FIELD1>
                <ID>58640</ID>
                <TASK>
                    <FILE>
                        <OPTIONS>1</OPTIONS>
                    </FILE>
                </TASK>
    </OUTER>

The text in the tag ID needs to be updated with a new value, it’s present in this variable NEW_ID1.The comparison should happen with the type tag, i.e only if the text == FIRST, we need to replace the ID with new ID, and write it back to XML similarly if type = SECOND, update ID with NEW_ID2 and so on,how to do so? I tried the following way,

tree = ET.parse("sample.xml")
root = tree.getroot()

det = tree.findall(".//OUTER[TYPE='FIRST']")
.
.
ID = NEW_ID1
tree.write("sample.xml")

but not able to manipulate it further

Asked By: LM10

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Source

Answer 1

You are close, except TYPE isn’t an attribute, it is a tag, so [TYPE='FIRST'] will not work.

Instead what you can do is iterate through all of the OUTER tags, and test to see if they contain a TYPE with the value "FIRST" as text value. Then you can grab the OUTER tags ID decendant, and change it’s text value.

For example:

tree = ET.parse("sample.xml")
root = tree.getroot()

for outer in tree.findall(".//OUTER"):
    elem = outer.find(".//FIRST")
    if elem.text == "FIRST":
        id_elem = outer.find(".//ID")
        id_elem.text = "NEWID1"

tree.write("sample.xml")

Note: I am assuming that your xml file doesn’t only contain the markup that is in your question. There should only be one root element in an xml file.

Answered By: Alexander

How to manipulate xml based on the specific tags?

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