Get list of XML attribute values in Python

Question

I need to get a list of attribute values from child elements in Python.

It\'s easiest to explain with an example.

Given some XML like this:

&         


        

Answer 1

My preferred python xml library is lxml , which wraps libxml2.
Xpath does seem the way to go here, so I'd write this as something like:

from lxml import etree

def getValues(xml, category):
    return [x.attrib['value'] for x in 
            xml.findall('/parent[@name="%s"]/*' % category)]

xml = etree.parse(open('filename.xml'))

>>> print getValues(xml, 'CategoryA')
['a1', 'a2', 'a3']
>>> print getValues(xml, 'CategoryB')
['b1', 'b2', 'b3]