Removing elements in Python with ET

Question

My code seems to be getting a value error and I am not sure why.

ValueError: list.remove(x): x not in list

When I use a print statement I seem to find the log setting correctly because it prints the location and number I would expect to see. I am just not sure why I can't remove it.

XML
...
<security>
    <rules>
        <entry name="blah">
            <log-setting> log-forwarding-main

And here is the two scipts I have tried

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('filelocation')
rules = tree.findall('.//security/rules/entry')

for rem_rule in rules:
    log = rem_rule.findall('log-setting')
    rem_rule.remove(log)
tree.write('newfilelocation')

And tried this per a different post

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('filelocation')
rules = tree.findall('.//security/rules/entry')

for rem_rule in rules[:]:
    for rem_rule in rules[:]:
        log = rem_rule.findall('log-setting')
        rem_rule.remove(log)
tree.write('newfilelocation')

Answer 1

According to the documentation xml.etree.ElementTree.Element has a function .remove(subelement). However, .findall() will return a list. Thus, replacing rem_rule.remove(log) with:

for element in log:
    rem_rule.remove(element)

solves the problem. Your complete snippet then looks like

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('test.xml')
rules = tree.findall('.//security/rules/entry')

for rem_rule in rules:
    log = rem_rule.findall('log-setting')
    for element in log:
        rem_rule.remove(element)
tree.write('newtest.xml')