XPath search with ElementTree

Question

New to xml. Looking for XPath to search a xml file with python ElementTree format

<root>
<child>One</child>
<child>Two</child>
<child>Three</child>
</root>

to do search for child with "Two" and return true/false

if it was started off like

from elementtree import ElementTree
root = ElementTree.parse(open(PathFile)).getroot()

how can this be achieved

Answer 1

I've been playing with ElementTree lately, lets see..

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> help(ElementTree.ElementPath)
>>> root = ElementTree.fromstring("""
<root><child>One</child><child>Two</child><child>Three</child></root>
""")
>>> ElementTree.ElementPath.findall(root, "child")
[<Element child at 2ac98c0>, <Element child at 2ac9638>, <Element child at 2ac9518>]
>>> elements = ElementTree.ElementPath.findall(root, "child")
>>> two = [x for x in elements if x.text == "Two"]
>>> two[0].text
'Two'

This is what you look for right? It says ElementPath has just limited xpath support though, but it does not say not support at all.

Answer 2

When the following XPath expression is evaluated:

    boolean(/*/*[.='Two'])

the result is true, if such an element (a child of the top element such that its string value is equal to "Two") exists,

and false otherwise.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev