Recursevly parsing an XML in Python 3 using ElementTree

parse.py

"""To run this: $ python3 parse.py test.xml

The script will pase a XML file and print its node tags.

Compatible with Python 3; changing the print statements should make this 
compatible with Python 2.
"""

import sys

# http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html
from xml.etree import ElementTree

def operation(node):
    """Just a sample function that prints the tag of a node."""
    return print(node.tag)
    
def recur_node(node, f):
    """Applies function f on given node and goes down recursively to its 
       children.
        
       Keyword arguments:
       node - the root node
       f - function to be applied on node and its children
        
    """
    if node != None:
        f(node)
        for item in node.getchildren():
            recur_node(item, f)
    else:
        return 0

def main(fileName):
    try:
        root = ElementTree.parse(fileName).getroot()
    except:
        # there should be some proper exception handling here
        return -1
    return recur_node(root, operation)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  sys.exit(main(sys.argv[1]))

Thanks for the post.

This also works

def get_node(n):
if n:
f(n)
for m in n:
yield from get_node(m)

list(get_node(root))