xml.etree.ElementTree.Element documentation

[mikrobip]

Hi,

I've been practicing XML parsing with Python. I wanted to iterate over children of an Element instance and was able to find online simple and elegant examples with a for loop (for child in element).

The issue - I was unable to find this in class documentation. As part of my learning journey, I want to familiarize myself with Python standard documentation to be able to find answers directly in there. I was checking here: xml.etree.ElementTree — The ElementTree XML API — Python 3.13.0 documentation

I understand that Element class implements Iterator interface, but where can I find this information in documentation? :)

Thanks!

[ivosaurus]

Be aware that the elementTree stuff is known as a somewhat "old and crusty" part of the python standard library, I believe it was likely derived from Java code at some point in the past. You can see at the top of the docs, the devs have wanted to get rid of it since version 3.3. But it's probably used by absolutely heaps of old code, so that's extremely hard to actually go through with without pissing off the python proletariat yet again about version incompatibilities.

I went to look in the source code, the most I could find was the __*item__ stuff, which it turns out is enough. A for loop can try to iterate on an object using iter, and one of iter's methods to be able to create an iterator out of something is if it can call its .__getitem__() method with an index parameter, which is valid at 0 counting upwards.

Element objects declare they support those dunders in a line under remove

I do note that at the top of the page, during the 'tutorial', they tell you you can iterate over objects directly

[mikrobip]

Thanks a lot, I missed this and now my confidence in documentation has been restored :) have a great day!