Is there an elegant way to count tag elements in a xml file using lxml in python?

Question

I could read the content of the xml file to a string and use string operations to achieve this, but I guess there is a more elegant way to do this. Since I did not find a clue i

Answer 1

If you want to count all author tags:

import lxml.etree
doc = lxml.etree.parse(xml)
count = doc.xpath('count(//author)')