How to insert text out of xml entries with etree.Element

Question

I built an xml file with lxml.etree, and this is the result:

<BigData>
  <user>
    <enum>
      <tree>sometext</tree>
    </enum>
   </user>
</BigData>

I am trying to put an entry and come up with this:

<BigData>
  <user>**this_is_the_extra_text**
    <enum>
      <tree>sometext</tree>
    </enum>
   </user>
</BigData>

Any idea on how to do this? if i use user = SubElement(user, BigData).text = 'this_is_the_extra_text', i get an error. Note: i just want plain text there, not a new xml entry.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming that user is a variable referencing <user> element, you can simply set its text property to add text node as the first child.

This is the setup for demo :

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
>>> root = ET.Element('BigData')
>>> user = ET.SubElement(root, 'user')
>>> enum = ET.SubElement(user, 'enum')
>>> print ET.tostring(root)
<BigData><user><enum /></user></BigData>

and the following is the output after setting user.text :

>>> user.text = 'this_is_the_extra_text'
>>> print ET.tostring(root)
<BigData><user>this_is_the_extra_text<enum /></user></BigData>

If you want to add the text node after other child element however (in other words, text node isn't going to be the first child), you'll need to set tail property of the preceding element instead. For example, adding text node after enum element works as follow :

>>> enum.tail = 'this_is_the_extra_text'
>>> print ET.tostring(root)
<BigData><user><enum />this_is_the_extra_text</user></BigData>