Python XML Parsing without root

Question

I wanted to parse a fairly huge xml-like file which doesn\'t have any root element. The format of the file is:

Answer 1

ElementTree.fromstringlist accepts an iterable (that yields strings).

Using it with itertools.chain:

import itertools
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
# import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

with open('xml-like-file.xml') as f:
    it = itertools.chain('', f, '')
    root = ET.fromstringlist(it)

# Do something with `root`
root.find('.//tag3')