python xml.etree.ElementTree append to subelement

Question

I am trying to use xml.etree.ElementTree to parse a xml file, find a specific tag, append a child to that tag, append another child to the newly created tag and add text to the

Answer 1

You need to specify b as a parent element for c.

Also, for getting the a tag you don't need a loop - just take the root (a).

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('test.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

a = root.find('a')
b = ET.SubElement(a, 'b')
c = ET.SubElement(b, 'c')
c.text = 'text3'

print ET.tostring(root)

prints:

<root>
    <a>
        <b>
          <c>text1</c>
        </b>
        <b>
          <c>text2</c>
        </b>
        <b>
          <c>text3</c>
        </b>
    </a>
</root>

Answer 2

I prefer to define my own function for adding text:

def SubElementWithText(parent, tag, text):
    attrib = {}
    element = parent.makeelement(tag, attrib)
    parent.append(element)
    element.text = text
    return element

Which then is very convenient to use as:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('test.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

a = root.find('a')
b = ET.SubElement(a, 'b')
c = SubElementWithText(b, 'c', 'text3')