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I read the following: "Deprecated since version 3.2, will be removed in version 3.9: Use list(elem) or iteration." ( https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.Element.getchildren )

My code works for python 3.8 and below :

tree = ET.parse("....xml")
root = tree.getroot()
getID= (root.getchildren()[0].attrib['ID'])
However, when I try to update it for python 3.9, I am unable to
tree = ET.parse("....xml")
root = tree.getroot()
getID= (root.list(elem)[0].attrib['ID'])
I get the following errors
AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'list'
                Is there a rationale behind removing a core function from a package in the middle of a major version?  What happened to backward compatibility?  What is the sense of suddenly saying this package should not nativley support this function?
– raw-bin hood
                Nov 26, 2022 at 18:35
"Use list(elem) or iteration" means literally list(root), not root.list(). The following will work:
getID = list(root)[0].attrib['ID']
You can wrap any iterable in a list, and the deprecation note specifically tells you root is iterable. Since it's rather inefficient to allocate a list for just one element, you can get the iterator and pull the first element from that:
getID = next(iter(root)).attrib['ID']
This is a more compact notation for
for child in root:
    getID = child.attrib['ID']
    break
The major difference is where the error will get raised when there is no child (directly by next vs when you try to access the non-existent getID variable).
        
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