remove element with ElementTree

[Stefan Behnel]

tdan, 09.03.2010 04:35:
> I have been using ElementTree to write an app, and would like to
> simply remove an element.
> But in ElementTree, you must know both the parent and the child
> element to do this.
> There is no getparent() function, so I am stuck if I only have an
> element.
>
> I am iterating over a table and getting all<td>  tags, checking their
> text, and conditionally deleting them:
>
> def RemoveElementWithText( topEl, subEl, text ):

Note that all-camel-case names are rather unusual for function names and 
rather used for class names. See PEP 8 for a style guide.


> 	for el in topEl.getiterator( subEl ):
> 		if el.text = text:
> 			break
> 	else:
> 		el = None
> 	return el
>
> RemoveElementWithText( table, 'td', 'sometext' )
>
> My table is like so:
>
> <table>
>   <thead>...
>   <tbody><tr><td>...
>
> Is there any way to do this in ElementTree?

I think the easiest is to iterate not over the elements themselves, but 
over their parents, and then to remove all children of the specified tag in 
each step.

Stefan