lxml.etree._Element.append() from a loop not working as expected

Question

I would like to know why in this code append() seems to work from inside the loop, but the resulting xml displays the modification from only the last iteration, whi

Answer 1

That's because you only created one instance of to be appended. So basically you just moved that one instance from one parent to another until the last append(sub) executed. Try to move creation of the element within for loop instead :

for i, item in enumerate(xml):
    sub = etree.fromstring('')
    item.append(sub)
    print('Fruit {} with sub appended: {}'.format(
        i, etree.tostring(item).decode('ascii')))
print()

output :

Resulting tree after iterating through items with append():