How to Parse XML in Python: ElementTree, Namespaces, Large Files, lxml
Rewritten as a tested reference. Every example was executed by the example package against small fixture files and one generated 23.8 MB file; the output blocks are copied from that run. The 2024 version's performance numbers were not measured and are replaced by a measured table; its xml.etree.cElementTree recommendation (a deprecated alias since Python 3.3; xml.etree.ElementTree already uses the C accelerator), its codecs.open encoding advice (wrong; the equivalent open(..., encoding="utf-8") is shown failing below) and a stray "Meta Description" section are gone; namespaces, large-file streaming, writing, xmltodict, pandas.read_xml and the current security picture are new.
The standard library does this without installing anything. Given a file books.xml with a <catalog> of <book> elements:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.parse("fixtures/books.xml").getroot()
for book in root.findall("book"):
print(book.get("id"), book.find("title").text, book.findtext("price", default="n/a"))
bk101 XML Developer's Guide 44.95
bk102 Midnight Rain 5.95
bk103 Maeve Ascendant n/a
That covers most "read an XML file" tasks. The rest of this page is the things that go wrong next, each with the real output: elements you cannot find because of a namespace, a file too big for parse(), encoding and syntax errors, and when to reach for lxml, xmltodict or pandas instead.
