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 <apple/> 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 <apple/> element within for loop instead :

for i, item in enumerate(xml):
    sub = etree.fromstring('<apple/>')
    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():
<tree>
  <fruit id="1">
    <apple/>
  </fruit>
  <fruit id="2">
    <apple/>
  </fruit>
</tree>