Inserting an element at a specific (initally empyt) path-CodePudding

I want to add an element to an xml-file at a specific path whose subnodes do not exist in the initial example.xml file. When adding the element, I want to create all the necessary child nodes "on the fly" and not one at a time.

I don't know the correct way to do it, the following code-snipped is just an example for illustration purposes. Maybe it is possible using different methods from etree.

My example:

from lxml import etree

tree = etree.parse('example.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
path = etree.Element('/leadSinger/names/firstName')
etree.Element(path, "Freddie")

tree.write('example.xml')

The initial example.xml file:

<interpret>
    <name>Queen</name>
<interpret>

The example.xml file after the element was created, inserted and written:

<interpret>
    <name>Queen</name>
    <leadSinger>
        <names>
            <firstName>Freddie</firstName>
        </names>
    </leadSinger>
</interpret>

CodePudding user response：

You can try it this way:

lead = """<leadSinger>
        <names>
            <firstName>Freddie</firstName>
        </names>
    </leadSinger>    
    """

elem = etree.fromstring(lead)
destination = root.xpath('//interpret/name')[0]

destination.addnext(elem)

print(etree.tostring(root, encoding="unicode", pretty_print=True))

Which should get you the expected output.