gistfile1.py

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('thorpe.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

for item in root.iter('DISS_para'):
	abstract = (item.text)
	myList = [abstract.split('\t')]
	''.join(map(str,myList))
	print(abstract)

So, you want to group all the abstracts into one string?

Try this:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('thorpe.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

combined_abstracts = "" # create empty string variable that we can build onto in our loop below

for item in root.iter("DISS_para"):
    combined_abstracts += item.text # get item text and use __iadd__ (+=) method to concatenate string of combined abstracts 

print(combined_abstracts) # print the combined_abstracts string object which should contain all of the abstracts

If you want to strip all the tabs, you can import the regex module and do this within the print command:

import re

...

print(re.sub('\t', '', combined_abstracts))

So that would be:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import re

tree = ET.parse('thorpe.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

combined_abstracts = "" 

for item in root.iter("DISS_para"):
    combined_abstracts += item.text

print(re.sub('\t', '', combined_abstracts))

You could also strip the tabs in the loop and print just the clean string:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import re

tree = ET.parse('thorpe.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

combined_abstracts = "" 

for item in root.iter("DISS_para"):
    combined_abstracts += re.sub('\t', '', item.text)

print(combined_abstracts)

If you wanted to replace the tabs with a space:

combined_abstracts += re.sub('\t', ' ', item.text)

That's amazing! It works!

Trying to add it to a CSV file, but it's parsing every letter. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import re
import csv

forCSV =[]
forCSV.append(['abstract'])

tree = ET.parse('thorpe.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

combined_abstracts = ""

for item in root.iter("DISS_para"):
combined_abstracts += re.sub('\t', '', item.text)

forCSV.append(combined_abstracts)

with open('outputFile.csv', 'w', newline='') as csvfile:
wr = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=',')
wr.writerows(forCSV)

sorry, that indentation is all fucked up

thanks, I found my mistake! you're a wizard!