access ElementTree node parent node

There's no direct support in the form of a parent attribute, but you can perhaps use the patterns described here to achieve the desired effect. The following one-liner is suggested (updated from the linked-to post to Python 3.8) to create a child-to-parent mapping for a whole tree, using the method xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.iter:

parent_map = {c: p for p in tree.iter() for c in p}

Vinay's answer should still work, but for Python 2.7+ and 3.2+ the following is recommended:

parent_map = {c:p for p in tree.iter() for c in p}

getiterator() is deprecated in favor of iter(), and it's nice to use the new dict list comprehension constructor.

Secondly, while constructing an XML document, it is possible that a child will have multiple parents, although this gets removed once you serialize the document. If that matters, you might try this:

parent_map = {}
for p in tree.iter():
    for c in p:
        if c in parent_map:
            parent_map[c].append(p)
            # Or raise, if you don't want to allow this.
        else:
            parent_map[c] = [p]
            # Or parent_map[c] = p if you don't want to allow this

Pasting here my answer from https://stackoverflow.com/a/54943960/492336:

I had a similar problem and I got a bit creative. Turns out nothing prevents us from adding the parent info ourselves. We can later strip it once we no longer need it.

def addParentInfo(et):
    for child in et:
        child.attrib['__my_parent__'] = et
        addParentInfo(child)

def stripParentInfo(et):
    for child in et:
        child.attrib.pop('__my_parent__', 'None')
        stripParentInfo(child)

def getParent(et):
    if '__my_parent__' in et.attrib:
        return et.attrib['__my_parent__']
    else:
        return None

# Example usage

tree = ...
addParentInfo(tree.getroot())
el = tree.findall(...)[0]
parent = getParent(el)
while parent:
    doSomethingWith(parent)
    parent = getParent(parent)
stripParentInfo(tree.getroot())

The XPath '..' selector cannot be used to retrieve the parent node on 3.5.3 nor 3.6.1 (at least on OSX), eg in interactive mode:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.fromstring('<parent><child></child></parent>')
child = root.find('child')
parent = child.find('..') # retrieve the parent
parent is None # unexpected answer True

The last answer breaks all hopes...

Got an answer from

https://towardsdatascience.com/processing-xml-in-python-elementtree-c8992941efd2

Tip: use '...' inside of XPath to return the parent element of the current element.

for object_book in root.findall('.//*[@name="The Hunger Games"]...'):
    print(object_book)

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

f1 = "yourFile"

xmlTree = ET.parse(f1)

for root in xmlTree.getroot():
    print(root.tag)