In my xml file, I have nodes like this:

<waitingJobs idList="J03ac2db8 J03ac2fb0"/>

I know how to use .findall to search for attributes but now, it looks like I would need to use regular expressions because I can't just use

root.findall('./[@attrib='value']')

I'd have to use

root.findall('./[@attrib='*value*']')

QUESTION

1. Is this possible with xml.etree?
2. How do you do this with lxml?

solution

Unfortunately, things like contains() and starts-with() are not supported by xml.etree.ElementTree built-in library. You can manually check the attribute, finding all waitingJobs and using .attrib to get to the idList value:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

data = """<jobs>
    <waitingJobs idList="J03ac2db8 J03ac2fb0"/>
</jobs>
"""

root = ET.fromstring(data)
value = 'J03ac2db8'
print([elm for elm in root.findall(".//waitingJobs[@idList]") 
       if value in elm.attrib["idList"]])

With lxml.etree, you can use xpath() method and contains() function:

import lxml.etree as ET

data = """<jobs>
    <waitingJobs idList="J03ac2db8 J03ac2fb0"/>
</jobs>
"""

root = ET.fromstring(data)

value = 'J03ac2db8'
print(root.xpath(".//waitingJobs[contains(@idList, '%s')]" % value))