How to search and replace text in an XML file using Python?

Question

How do I search an entire xml file for a specific text pattern and then replace each occurrence of that text with new text pattern in Python 3.5?

Ever

Answer 1

Caveats:

• I have never worked with the xml.etree.ElementTree library
• I have never worked with it because I never find myself manipulating XML
• I don't know if this is the "best" way compared to someone that knows the library in and out
• Commentors seem set on judging you instead of helping you out

This is a modification from this excellent answer. The thing is, you need to read the XML file in and parse it.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

with open('xmlfile.xml', encoding='latin-1') as f:
  tree = ET.parse(f)
  root = tree.getroot()

  for elem in root.getiterator():
    try:
      elem.text = elem.text.replace('FEATURE NAME', 'THIS WORKED')
      elem.text = elem.text.replace('FEATURE NUMBER', '123456')
    except AttributeError:
      pass

tree.write('output.xml', encoding='latin-1')

Note that you can change the encoding parameter to something else such as: utf-8, cp1252, ISO-8859-1, etc. Really depends on your system and file.