Parse a xml file with multiple root element in python

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i have a xml file, and i need to fetch some of the tags from it for some use, which have data like: 

<?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"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein1">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria1" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland1" direction="W"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia1" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>

i need to parse this, so i used:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse("myfile.xml")
root = tree.getroot()

this code giving error at line 2: xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: junk after document element:

i think this is because multiple xml tags, do you have any idea, how should i parse this?

python-2.7 xml parsing python
3 Answers

There's a simple trick I've used to parse such pseudo-XML (Wazuh rule files for what it matters) - just temporarily wrap it inside a fake element <whatever></whatever> thus forming a single root over all these "roots".

In your case, rather than having an invalid XML like this:

<data> ... </data>
<data> ... </data>

Just before passing it to the parser temporarily rewrite it as:

<whatever>
    <data> ... </data>
    <data> ... </data>
</whatever>

Then you parse it as usual and iterate <data> elements.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
import pathlib

file = Path('rules/0020-syslog_rules.xml')
data = b'<rules>' + file.read_bytes() + b'</rules>'
etree.fromstring(data)
etree.findall('group')
... array of Elements ...
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