Essential Books

Searching the XML with XPath

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Starting with version 2.7 ElementTree has a better support for XPath queries. XPath is a syntax to enable you to navigate through an xml like SQL is used to search through a database. Both find and findall functions support XPath. The xml below will be used for this example 

<Catalog>
   <Books>
       <Book id="1" price="7.95">
           <Title>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</Title>
           <Author>Philip K. Dick</Author>
       </Book>
       <Book id="5" price="5.95">
           <Title>The Colour of Magic</Title>
           <Author>Terry Pratchett</Author>
       </Book>
       <Book id="7" price="6.95">
           <Title>The Eye of The World</Title>
           <Author>Robert Jordan</Author>
       </Book>
   </Books>
</Catalog>

Searching for all books: 

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('sample.xml')
tree.findall('Books/Book')

Searching for the book with title = ‘The Colour of Magic’: 

tree.find("Books/Book[Title='The Colour of Magic']") 
# always use '' in the right side of the comparison

Searching for the book with id = 5: 

tree.find("Books/Book[@id='5']")
# searches with xml attributes must have '@' before the name

Search for the second book: 

tree.find("Books/Book[2]")
# indexes starts at 1, not 0

Search for the last book: 

tree.find("Books/Book[last()]")
# 'last' is the only xpath function allowed in ElementTree

Search for all authors: 

tree.findall(".//Author")
#searches with // must use a relative path
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Manipulating XML:
* Manipulating XML
* Opening and reading using an ElementTree
* Modifying an XML File
* Create and Build XML Documents
* Opening and reading large XML files using iterparse incremental parsing
* Searching the XML with XPath
Table Of Contents
0 Getting Started
1 List comprehension
2 Filter
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4 Functions
5 Decorators
6 Math module
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39 Incompatibilities moving from Python 2 to Python 3
40 Virtual environments
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44 Hidden Features
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50 The __name__ special variable
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52 Networking
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54 Print Function
55 os.path module
56 Creating Python packages
57 Parsing Command Line Arguments
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60 setup.py
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63 Itertools Module
64 Recursion
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68 pip PyPI Package Manager
69 locale module
70 Exceptions
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72 deque module
73 Distributing self-contained applications
74 Property Objects
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76 Debugging
77 Reading and Writing CSV
78 Dynamic code execution with exec and eval
79 PyInstaller - Distributing Python Code
80 Iterables and Iterators
81 Data Visualization
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83 args and kwargs
84 functools module
85 Garbage Collection
86 Indentation
87 Security and Cryptograhy
88 Pickle data serialization
89 urllib
90 Binary Data
91 Python and Excel
92 Idioms
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94 Difference between a module and a package
95 Data Serialization
96 Python Concurrency
97 RabbitMQ using AMQPStorm
98 PostgreSQL
99 Descriptor
100 Common Pitfalls
101 Multiprocessing
102 Creating temporary files with tempfile
103 Working with ZIP files
104 Stack
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107 Working around Global Interpreter Lock
108 Deployment using conda
109 Logging
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111 os module
112 Comments and documentation
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114 Python HTTP Server
115 Alternatives to switch statement from other languages
116 List destructuring
117 Accessing Python source code and bytecode
118 Mixins
119 Attribute Access
120 ArcPy
121 Python Anti-Patterns
122 Plugin and Extension Classes
123 Websockets
124 Immutable data types
125 String representations of class
126 Arrays
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128 Polymorphism
129 Alternative Python implementations
130 List Comprehensions
131 Web Server Gateway Intrerface WSGI
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133 Abstract Syntax Tree
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135 Unicode
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138 Neo4j
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148 Defining functions with list arguments
149 SQLite3 module
150 Persistence with pickle
151 Connecting to SQL Server
152 Design Patterns
153 Multidimensional arrays
154 Audio
155 pyglet
156 queue module
157 ijson
158 webbrowser module
159 base64 module
160 Flask
161 Groupby
162 Sockets and Message Encryption / Decryption
163 pygame
164 Input Subset and Output External Data Files using Pandas
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
168 Creating a Windows Service
169 Mutable vs. Immutable
170 configparser
171 Common Exceptions
172 Optical Character Recognition OCR
173 Python Data Types
174 Partial functions
175 Generating graphs
176 Unzipping Files
177 Functional Programming
178 Python Virtual Environment - virtualenv
179 sys module
180 virtual environment with virtualenvwrapper
181 virtualenvwrapper on Windows
182 Python Requests Post
183 Plotting with Matplotlib
184 Python Lex-Yacc
185 pyaudio
186 shelve
187 pip and PyPI Package Manager
188 Writing to CSV from String or List
189 Raise Custom Errors Exceptions
190 Using loops within functions
191 Contributors