python ElementTree find child with certain text value

Question

I've been searching for a while. Is there a way to directly retrieve a child based on the text value of a tag?

For example:

 <a>
   <b>
       <c>h</c>
   </b>
   <b>
       <c>j</c>
   </b>
</a>

And say I want to retrieve the child be whose "c" text value == j. Is there a way of doing this other than having to get all the "b" children and looping through them and checking the c value?

Answer 1

If you use lxml you can use the XPath expression //c[text()='j']

import lxml.etree as et

doc = '''
<a>
   <b>
       <c>h</c>
   </b>
   <b>
       <c>j</c>
   </b>
</a>
'''

tree = et.fromstring(doc)

tree.xpath("/a/b/c[text()='j']")

This answer is relevant: How do I match contents of an element in XPath (lxml)?