Using XPATH in python etree to select node with out a specific attribute

Question

Following is my xml file contents,

    
        1
         


        

Answer 1

ElementTree only supports a subset of XPath 1.0. See https://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xpath-support. Functions such as not() or count() do not work.

Here is how you can select neighbor elements that don't have a direction attribute without using XPath:

tree = ET.parse(fileName)

for n in tree.iter('neighbor'):  
    if not(n.get('direction')):  # If the element has no 'direction' attribute...
        print n.get('name')      # then print the value of the 'name' attribute