Problems with lxml

Question

I have a Debian 6 setup that I won't touch too much.

$ python --version Python 2.6.6 $ dpkg --list|grep lxml ii python-lxml 2.2.8-2

Im trying to access with XPath like this:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET root = ET.parse("a.xml") for e in root.findall('.//rec/data/field[@name="id"]'): print(e.tag + " " + e.attrib.get('name'))

I got an error

Traceback (most recent call last): File "a.py", line 4, in <module> for e in root.findall('.//rec/data/field[@name="id"]'): File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 647, in findall return self._root.findall(path) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 355, in findall return ElementPath.findall(self, path) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/etree/ElementPath.py", line 198, in findall return _compile(path).findall(element) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/etree/ElementPath.py", line 176, in _compile p = Path(path) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/etree/ElementPath.py", line 93, in __init__ "expected path separator (%s)" % (op or tag) SyntaxError: expected path separator ([)

Is this XPath syntax not supported by python-lxml 2.2.8 ?

What version support this and is compatible with python 2.6 ?

Your title is about lxml but your code use xml. Also you code works in Python 2.7 Not sure whether it's a Python 2.6 only issue. — Leonardo.Z
– Leonardo.Z, Commented Nov 15, 2013 at 7:22
Confirmed. ElementTree in python 2.6 does not support searching for attributes [@attribute] syntax. See stackoverflow.com/questions/15753714/… — Leonardo.Z
– Leonardo.Z, Commented Nov 15, 2013 at 7:26

falsetru · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-15 07:52:26Z

The code is using ElementTree, not lxml.

findall method of ElementTree supports only subset of xpath. (XPath support in ElementTree).

[@attrib="value"] is also supported in ElementTree API 1.3. But ElementTree API is updated to 1.3 in Python 2.7.

Replace following line:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

with:

import lxml.etree as ET

to use lxml.

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