updating python-elementtree to overcome xpath selector issue

Question

I'm getting an error when searching for the attribute of a node in my xml using ElementTree.

expected path separator ([)

The source code is:

home_team_node = game_node.find( "team/team-metadata[@alignment='home']" )

This discussion on Stackoverflow leads me to conclude I need a newer version of ElementTree.

ElementTree XPath - Select Element based on attribute

When I list installed packages I see I have python-elementtree version 1.2.6-14. Yet even after running apt-get update, any effort to upgrade python-elementtree tells me I've got the latest version. I'm running Ubuntu 9.10, so maybe the repositories don't have elementtree 1.3.

What can I do to upgrade to version 1.3?

Answer 1

lxml is a very useful library for parsing XML, and it has a complete implementation of the ElementTree API. Try installing it with:

sudo apt-get install python-lxml

You'll then need to change your import statments to use the lxml version instead of the bundled elementree.

(I would resist using pip or easy_install unless you're in a virtualenv environment, to avoid confusion with the Debian-packaged Python libraries.)

Answer 2

Try installing lxml, ElementTree or cElementTree with either easy_install or pip. These packages are likely more recent than the ones in the apt repositories.

HTH