How to use ElemenTree for reading XML files in Python?

Question

I've got an XML file which looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
-<Object>
    <ID>Object_01</ID>
    <Location>Manchester</Location>
    <Date>01-01-2020</Date>
    <Time>15u59m05s</Time>   
-<Max_25Hz>
    <25Hz>0.916631065043311</25Hz>
    <25Hz>0.797958008447961</25Hz>
</Max_25Hz>
-<Max_75Hz>
    <75Hz>1.96599232706463</75Hz>
    <75Hz>1.48317837078523</75Hz>
</Max_75Hz>
</Object>

I still don't really understand the difference between attributes and text. With below code I tried to receive all the values using text.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

root = r'c:\data\FF\Desktop\My_files\XML-files\Object_01.xml'

tree = ET.parse(root)
root = tree.getroot()

for elem in root:
    for subelem in elem:
        print(subelem.text) 

Expected output:

Object_01
Manchester
01-01-2020
15u59m05s
0.916631065043311
0.797958008447961
1.96599232706463
1.48317837078523

Received output:

0.916631065043311
0.797958008447961
1.96599232706463
1.48317837078523

I tried to do to same with .attributes in the hope to receive all the 'column' names but then I received:

{}
{}
{}
{}

Answer 1

You can access them directly above the for-loop.

Ex:

tree = ET.ElementTree(ET.fromstring(X))
root = tree.getroot()

for elem in root:
    print(elem.text)       #! Access them Here
    for subelem in elem:
        print(subelem.text) 

Output:

Object_01
Manchester
01-01-2020
15u59m05s

        
0.916631065043311
0.797958008447961

        
1.96599232706463
1.48317837078523

Answer 2

You could give a try to https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict. It is almost a replacement for json module. This allows to read an xml file into a python dict. This simplifies greatly accessing the xml content.

Something like:

from xmldict import *

root = r'c:\data\FF\Desktop\My_files\XML-files\Object_01.xml'
with open(root) as file:
   xmlStr = file.read()
   xmldict = xml.parse(xmlStr)

print (xmldict['Object']['Id'])