👀 Views: 35 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-17

python xml parsing Python

This might be a silly question, but I'm trying to parse a custom XML-like data format where elements can have attributes and nested elements. However, I'm working with an scenario where the attributes of the root element are not being captured correctly. Here's a snippet of the data I'm working with: ```xml <root id="123" name="TestRoot"> <child name="Child1" value="10" /> <child name="Child2" value="20" /> </root> ``` I'm using the `xml.etree.ElementTree` module in Python 3.10, and my current parsing code looks like this: ```python import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET tree = ET.parse('data.xml') root = tree.getroot() print(f'Root ID: {root.attrib.get("id")}, Root Name: {root.attrib.get("name")}') for child in root: print(f'Child Name: {child.attrib.get("name")}, Child Value: {child.attrib.get("value")}') ``` When I run this, I get the following output: ``` Root ID: None, Root Name: None Child Name: Child1, Child Value: 10 Child Name: Child2, Child Value: 20 ``` It seems like the attributes on the root element are not being parsed at all, resulting in `None` values. I've checked the XML structure and it looks valid. I also tried using `ET.fromstring()` directly with the XML string instead of reading from a file, but I encountered the same scenario. Could this be related to how the XML file is formatted or encoded? I've confirmed that the file is UTF-8 encoded. Any ideas on how to ensure that the root element's attributes are correctly parsed? I appreciate any insights!