Does ElementTree's Parent XPath actually work?

[Jason Cooper]

On Friday, March 9, 2012 12:24:04 PM UTC-5, Jason Cooper wrote:
> I'm curious to know if anyone with ElementTree 1.3 has gotten the parent XPath to work? According to http://effbot.org/zone/element-xpath.htm, you should be able to do 
> 
>   >>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
>   >>> et.VERSION
>   '1.3.0'
>   ...
>   >>> elem.find('..')
>   >>> 
> 
> but that always return None for me. Has anyone else seen this particular XPath work? Am I just doing something wrong?
> 
> Thanks for you help!
> Jason
> 
> PS. In case you're wondering, yes I know that lxml supports parent points and, yes, I'm aware of http://effbot.org/zone/element.htm#accessing-parents. I'm really wondering if the mentioned XPath is broken or something.

Looks like I may have figured out my own answer. I just noticed that using '..' when searching on the tree (as opposed to the element) works as expected. Makes sense after I stepped back and recalled that the elements don't contain pointers to their parents. The tree, on the other hand, can see all.