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insertpositionlxmlelement

insert child element at last position

Given a parent element, how do I insert a child element at the last position? So far, using an index of -1 places the child at the penultimate position:

In [22]: et.tostring(test)
Out[22]: b'<a><orange/><b>hee</b><apple/><pear/><b>haa</b></a>'
In [23]: test.insert(-1, et.Element('mango'))
In [24]: et.tostring(test)
Out[24]: b'<a><orange/><b>hee</b><apple/><pear/><mango/><b>haa</b></a>'
Solution

  • Get the number of child elements (with len()) and use that as the index.

    from lxml import etree as et

test = et.fromstring('<a><orange/><b>hee</b><apple/><pear/><b>haa</b></a>')
test.insert(len(test), et.Element('mango')) 
print et.tostring(test, pretty_print=True)

    Output:

    <a>
  <orange/>
  <b>hee</b>
  <apple/>
  <pear/>
  <b>haa</b>
  <mango/>
</a>