Parse all the xml files in a directory one by one using ElementTree

Question

I'm parsing XML in python by ElementTree

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET 
tree = ET.parse('try.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

I wish to parse all the 'xml' files in a given directory. The user should enter only the directory name and I should be able to loop through all the files in directory and parse them one by one. Can someone tell me the approach. I'm using Linux.

Solution

Just create a loop over os.listdir():

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import os

path = '/path/to/directory'
for filename in os.listdir(path):
    if not filename.endswith('.xml'): continue
    fullname = os.path.join(path, filename)
    tree = ET.parse(fullname)

Comments

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

@MartijnPieters As I discovered last night if you want 10 times the speed use: import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET and don't worry about changing any code.

[Martijn Pieters]

@WinEunuuchs2Unix: better still: use lxml. Faster, and superior feature set.