import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET def extract_book_content_from_file(file_path): file = open(file_path, 'r') xml_content = file.read() file.close() root = ET.fromstring(xml_content) book_contents = [] for reading_data_item in root.findall('.//ReadingDataItem'): book_content = reading_data_item.find('BookContent').text if book_content: book_contents.append(book_content) for index, content in enumerate(book_contents, 1): print "%d. %s" % (index, content) if __name__ == '__main__': file_path = "C:\\Users\\edy\\Desktop\\dkx.xml" extract_book_content_from_file(file_path)