<grandParent>
<parent>
<child>Sam/Astronaut</child>
</parent>
</grandParent>
I want to modify the above XML by adding another child tag inside parent tag. I'm doing something like this..
tree = ET.parse("test.xml")
a=ET.Element('parent')
b=ET.SubElement(a,"child")
b.text="Jay/Doctor"
tree.write("test.xml")
Is this the correct way of modifying the xml file? Any better way? or what else should I be taking care of in the above code?
Your code creates a whole new tree and adds Jay to it. You need to connect Jay to the existing tree, not to a new one.
Try this:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse("test.xml")
a = tree.find('parent') # Get parent node from EXISTING tree
b = ET.SubElement(a,"child")
b.text = "Jay/Doctor"
tree.write("test.xml")
If you want to search for a particular child, you could do this:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse("test.xml")
a = tree.find('parent')
for b in a.findall('child'):
if b.text.strip() == 'Jay/Doctor':
break
else:
ET.SubElement(a,"child").text="Jay/Doctor"
tree.write("test.xml")
Notice a.findall() (similar to a.find(), but returns all of the named elements). xml.etree has very limited search criteria. You might consider using lxml.etree and its .xpath() method.
