The idea is to find the letter
element with name="E"
, get it's parent, remove the element from parent and extend the parent with element's children:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
data = """
<xml>
<letter name="B">
<letter name="D">
<letter name="E">
<letter name="F">
<letter name="G">
</letter>
</letter>
</letter>
</letter>
</letter>
</xml>
"""
XPATH = './/letter[@name="E"]'
tree = etree.fromstring(data)
letter = tree.find(XPATH)
parent = tree.find(XPATH + '/..')
parent.remove(letter)
parent.extend(letter)
print etree.tostring(tree)
It prints:
<xml>
<letter name="B">
<letter name="D">
<letter name="F">
<letter name="G">
</letter>
</letter>
</letter>
</letter>
</xml>
UPD (using iterative approach):
def iterparent(tree):
for parent in tree.getiterator():
for child in parent:
yield parent, child
tree = etree.fromstring(data)
for parent, child in iterparent(tree):
if child.tag == "letter" and child.attrib.get('name') == "E":
parent.remove(child)
parent.extend(child)
print etree.tostring(tree)
iterparent()
function is taken from Accessing Parents
paragraph from docs.