XML counting and printing elements

Question

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<export_full date="2022-03-15 07:01:30" version="20160107">
    <items>
        <item code="A1005" image="https://www.astramodel.cz/images/A/800x600/A1005.jpg" imageDate="2014-04-08" name="Uhlíková tyčka 0.6mm (1m)" brandId="32" brand="ASTRA" czk="89.00" eur="3.50" czksmap="89.00" eursmap="3.50" hasPrice="true" created="2014-01-09" changed="" new="false" stock="true" date="" stock2="true" date2="" stock3="high" date3="" discontinued="false" weight="0.001" length="0.001" width="0.001" height="1.000" recycling_fee="">
            <descriptions>
                <description title="Charakteristika" order="1">&lt;p&gt;Tyč z uhlíkových vláken kruhového průřezu ø0.6&amp;nbsp;mm v délce 1&amp;nbsp;m. Hmotnost 0,3&amp;nbsp;g&lt;/p&gt;</description>
            </descriptions>
        </item>

I have a an XML file which is significantly large however I am trying to count the total number of items and try to type the name attribute of each item, above you can see of how each individual item with its tags looks like.I do get a number when trying to print the total item count however I'm not sure if I'm going about it the right way and in terms of name attributes I am getting nothing so far, please help.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('export_full.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
test = [elem.tag for elem in root.iter("item")]
print(len(test))

for item in root.iter('./item[@name]'):
    print(item.attrib)

Answer 1

To evaluate an XPath expression use findall() function. Note the "item" elements are children of "items" element so need to add 'items' to the XPath if using an absolute path otherwise use ".//item[@name]".

for item in root.findall('./items/item[@name]'):
    print(item.attrib)

If you want it iterate over all items and add the name attribute to a list.

items = [elem.get('name') for elem in root.iter("item")]
print(len(items), items)  # print count of items and list of names

If XML is huge then you can benefit by doing an incremental parse of the XML using iterparse() function.

Example below iterate overs the XML and if tag is 'item' then print its 'name' attribute. You can add whatever logic you want to check.

count = 0
for _, elem in ET.iterparse('export_full.xml'):
    if elem.tag == 'item':
        print(elem.get('name')) # print out just the name
        count += 1
        # print(elem.attrib) # print out all attributes
print(count) # display number of items