👀 Views: 18 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

xml lxml python parsing Python

I'm optimizing some code but I am using the `lxml` library in Python to parse an XML file, but I am running into issues where attributes of nested elements are sometimes missing. My XML structure looks something like this: ```xml <root> <item id="1" name="Item1"> <details description="First Item"/> </item> <item id="2" name="Item2"> <details description="Second Item"/> </item> </root> ``` When I attempt to parse the XML like this: ```python from lxml import etree xml_data = '''<root>...</root>''' # full XML string here root = etree.fromstring(xml_data) items = root.findall('.//item') for item in items: item_id = item.get('id') item_name = item.get('name') details = item.find('./details') details_description = details.get('description') if details is not None else None print(f'ID: {item_id}, Name: {item_name}, Description: {details_description}') ``` I'm expecting to get output for both items, but occasionally, the `details_description` returns `None` for some `item`s. I suspect it might be due to some hidden characters or malformed XML. I've validated the XML structure, and it seems correct, but the question continues. To troubleshoot, I added some print statements, and they show that the `details` element is present, but for some reason, its attributes aren't being retrieved correctly in some cases. Is there a best practice for handling such scenarios in `lxml`? Should I be using different parsing techniques, or is there a way to ensure that all attributes are reliably fetched? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I'm using Python stable in this project.