New submission from Raymond Hettinger:
The inner objects are Elements which has a great deal of flexiblity (for
example, they can be iterated over directly). The outermost object is an
ElementTree which lacks those capabilities (it only supports findall).
For example in a catalog of books:
catalog = xml.etree.ElementTree.parse('books.xml')
# This succeeds
for book in catalog.findall('book'):
print(book.tag)
# This fails:
for book in catalog:
print(book.tag)
# But for inner elements, we have more options
book = catalog.find('bk101')
for subelement in book:
print(subelement.tag)
Here are the differences between the API for ElementTree and Element
In [9]: set(dir(book)) - set(dir(catalog))
Out[9]:
{'__delitem__',
'__getitem__',
'__len__',
'__nonzero__',
'__setitem__',
'_children',
'append',
'attrib',
'clear',
'copy',
'extend',
'get',
'getchildren',
'insert',
'items',
'itertext',
'keys',
'makeelement',
'remove',
'set',
'tag',
'tail',
'text'}
In [10]: set(dir(catalog)) - set(dir(book))
Out[10]: {'_root', '_setroot', 'getroot', 'parse', 'write', 'write_c14n'}
Note, the XML data model requires that the outermost element have some
capabilities that inner elements don't have (such as comments and processing
instructions). That said, the outer element shouldn't have fewer capabilities
that the inner elements.
----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 214521
nosy: rhettinger
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: ElementTree objects should support all the same methods are Element
objects
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.5
_______________________________________
Python tracker <[email protected]>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue21028>
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