Using XPath in ElementTree

There are 2 problems that you have.

1) element contains only the root element, not recursively the whole document. It is of type Element not ElementTree.

2) Your search string needs to use namespaces if you keep the namespace in the XML.

To fix problem #1:

You need to change:

element = ET.parse(fp).getroot()

to:

element = ET.parse(fp)

To fix problem #2:

You can take off the xmlns from the XML document so it looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?><ItemSearchResponse>  <Items>    <Item>      <ItemAttributes>        <ListPrice>          <Amount>2260</Amount>        </ListPrice>      </ItemAttributes>      <Offers>        <Offer>          <OfferListing>            <Price>              <Amount>1853</Amount>            </Price>          </OfferListing>        </Offer>      </Offers>    </Item>  </Items></ItemSearchResponse>

With this document you can use the following search string:

e = element.findall('Items/Item/ItemAttributes/ListPrice/Amount')

The full code:

from elementtree import ElementTree as ETfp = open("output.xml","r")element = ET.parse(fp)e = element.findall('Items/Item/ItemAttributes/ListPrice/Amount')for i in e:  print i.text

Alternate fix to problem #2:

Otherwise you need to specify the xmlns inside the srearch string for each element.

The full code:

from elementtree import ElementTree as ETfp = open("output.xml","r")element = ET.parse(fp)namespace = "{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}"e = element.findall('{0}Items/{0}Item/{0}ItemAttributes/{0}ListPrice/{0}Amount'.format(namespace))for i in e:    print i.text

Both print:

2260

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ETtree = ET.parse("output.xml")namespace = tree.getroot().tag[1:].split("}")[0]amount = tree.find(".//{%s}Amount" % namespace).text

Also, consider using lxml. It's way faster.

from lxml import ElementTree as ET

Element tree uses namespaces so all the elements in your xml have name like{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}Items

So make the search include the namespacee.g.

search = '{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}Items/{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}Item/{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}ItemAttributes/{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}ListPrice/{http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2008-08-19}Amount'element.findall( search )

gives the element corresponding to 2260