Python XML processing with lxml

In many applications, you will want to visit every element in a document, or perhaps to retrieve information from all the tags of a certain kind. This method, on some ElementTree instance ET, will return an iterator that visits all matching tags.

ET.getiterator(tag=None)

If you omit the argument, you will get an iterator that generates every element in the tree, in document order.

If you want to visit only tags with a certain name, pass that name as the argument.

Here are some examples. In these examples, assume that page is an ElementTree instance that contains an XHTML page. The first example would print every tag name in the page, in document order.

for  elt in page.getiterator():
    print elt.tag

The second example would look at every div element in the page, and for those that have a class attribute, it prints those attributes.

for  elt in page.getiterator('div'):
    if  elt.attrib.has_key('class'):
        print elt.get('class')