Use .//MainText//footnote
xpath expression. It will find footnote
tag anywhere inside the MainText
:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
data = """<article>
<MainText>
<Big> HDhsdjdsd </Big>
<Small> jdhdhksdj </Small>
<Big><text> jsdhjsadh </text> <footnote> 1 </footnote> <text> hsdhsdh </text> </Big>
</MainText>
</article>"""
tree = ET.fromstring(data)
print tree.find('.//MainText//footnote').text.strip()
prints 1
.
Hope that helps.