# xml.etree.ElementTree --- The ElementTree XML API — Parsing XML

> We'll be using the fictive country_data.xml XML document as the sample data for this section Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically): ```xml <?xml version="1.0"?> <data> <country name="Liechtenstein"> <rank>1</rank> <year>2008</year> <gdppc>141100</gdppc> <neighbor name="A

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## Metadata

- Canonical URL: <https://wikikv.com/k/ref-python-e859758da96600984555>
- Knowledge kind: `reference`
- Confidence: `0.72`
- Independent verifications: `0`
- Updated: `2026-08-16T09:32:14.545391+00:00`
- Tags: `reference-seed`, `python`, `library`, `xml`, `etree`, `elementtree`, `api`, `parsing`

## Provenance

- Source: <https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/f10166035d602da5052e8a48f9d5c216c57b401d/Doc/library/xml.etree.elementtree.rst>
- Source name: Python Documentation
- Source revision: `f10166035d602da5052e8a48f9d5c216c57b401d`
- Source license: `PSF-2.0`
- Attribution and license details: <https://wikikv.com/licenses>

## Knowledge

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions).

We'll be using the fictive country_data.xml XML document as the sample data for this section

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```xml
&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
&lt;data&gt;
&lt;country name="Liechtenstein"&gt;
&lt;rank&gt;1&lt;/rank&gt;
&lt;year&gt;2008&lt;/year&gt;
&lt;gdppc&gt;141100&lt;/gdppc&gt;
&lt;neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/&gt;
&lt;neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/&gt;
&lt;/country&gt;
&lt;country name="Singapore"&gt;
&lt;rank&gt;4&lt;/rank&gt;
&lt;year&gt;2011&lt;/year&gt;
&lt;gdppc&gt;59900&lt;/gdppc&gt;
&lt;neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/&gt;
&lt;/country&gt;
&lt;country name="Panama"&gt;
&lt;rank&gt;68&lt;/rank&gt;
&lt;year&gt;2011&lt;/year&gt;
&lt;gdppc&gt;13600&lt;/gdppc&gt;
&lt;neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/&gt;
&lt;neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/&gt;
&lt;/country&gt;
&lt;/data&gt;
```

We can import this data by reading from a file

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET tree = ET.parse('country_data.xml') root = tree.getroot()

Or directly from a string

root = ET.fromstring(country_data_as_string)

fromstring parses XML from a string directly into an Element, which is the root element of the parsed tree. Other parsing functions may create an ElementTree. Check the documentation to be sure.

As an Element, root has a tag and a dictionary of attributes

&gt;&gt;&gt; root.tag 'data' &gt;&gt;&gt; root.attrib {}

It also has children nodes over which we can iterate

&gt;&gt;&gt; for child in root: ... print(child.tag, child.attrib) ... country {'name': 'Liechtenstein'} country {'name': 'Singapore'} country {'name': 'Panama'}

Children are nested, and we can access specific child nodes by index

Not all elements of the XML input will end up as elements of the parsed tree. Currently, this module skips over any XML comments, processing instructions, and document type declarations in the input. Nevertheless, trees built using this module's API rather than parsing from XML text can have comments and processing instructions in them; they will be included when generating XML output. A document type declaration may be accessed by passing a custom TreeBuilder instance to the XMLParser constructor.

Attribution: Adapted from Python Documentation under PSF-2.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.