Removing the same element across all the nodes of an XML tree - python-3.x

Question

For example sake, this is the xml file that I'm working with:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank>1</rank>
<year>2008</year>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
<neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
<description>Liechtenstein has a lot of flowers.</description>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank>4</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
<description>Singapore has a lot of street markets.</description>
</country>
<country name="Panama">
<rank>68</rank>
<year>2011</year>
<gdppc>13600</gdppc>
<neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
<neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
<description>Panama has a lot of great food.</description>
</country>
</data>
How would I write the code such that I could delete one node element (i.e. year or description) across each of the country nodes. For example, in the following code:
# To remove
# for country in root.findall('country'):
# year = int(country.find('year').text)
# if year > 2010:
# root.remove(country)
# tree.write('sample.xml')
I can remove any country nodes whose attribute of the element year is greater than 2010. But that removes the entire node, not just the year element. I know that I can remove a single element of a node with the following:
# for country in root.findall('country'):
# description_node = country.find('description')
# if description_node.text == "Singapore has a lot of street markets.":
# country.remove(description_node)
# tree.write('sample.xml')
But now I want to create a condition where I delete the description element or the year element or the neighbor element throughout all of the country nodes present.

Answer 1

One option might be the following that uses .findall and .remove:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
file = 'source.xml'
data = ET.parse(file)
for country in data.findall('country'):
for neighbor in country.findall('neighbor'):
country.remove(neighbor)
for year in country.findall('year'):
country.remove(year)
for description in country.findall('description'):
country.remove(description)
ET.dump(data)
Output:
python yourscript.py
<data>
<country name="Liechtenstein">
<rank>1</rank>
<gdppc>141100</gdppc>
</country>
<country name="Singapore">
<rank>4</rank>
<gdppc>59900</gdppc>
</country>
<country name="Panama">
<rank>68</rank>
<gdppc>13600</gdppc>
</country>
</data>

Answer 2

In XSLT 3.0 you can do, for example:
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="3.0">
<xsl:mode on-no-match="shallow-copy"/>
<xsl:template match="year[. > 2000]"/>
</xsl:transform>
The empty template rule causes elements that match the predicate to be removed; the xsl:mode instruction causes everything else to be retained.