Identifying Unique Elements in Two Lists via XML Comparison

This function takes two lists as parameters, converts them to XML strings using the lxml library, then compares the two XML strings to find unique elements in list1 that are not present in list2.

Technology Stack : Python, lxml

Code Type : Python Function

Code Difficulty : Intermediate

                
                    
def find_unique_elements(list1, list2):
    from lxml import etree
    
    # Convert lists to XML strings
    xml_list1 = etree.tostring(etree.Element("root", list1), pretty_print=True).decode()
    xml_list2 = etree.tostring(etree.Element("root", list2), pretty_print=True).decode()
    
    # Create XML trees
    tree1 = etree.fromstring(xml_list1)
    tree2 = etree.fromstring(xml_list2)
    
    # Find unique elements in list1 that are not in list2
    unique_elements = tree1.xpath('//item[not(contains(@id, "%s"))]' % xml_list2)
    
    # Extract unique elements
    result = [item.text for item in unique_elements]
    
    return result