Yes, in the package xml.etree you can find the built-in function related to XML. (also available for python2)

The one specifically you are looking for is findall.

For example:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.fromstring(some_xml_data)
all_name_elements = tree.findall('.//name')

With:

In [1]: some_xml_data = "<help><person><name>dean</name></person></help>"

I get the following:

In [10]: tree.findall(".//name")
Out[10]: [<Element 'name' at 0x7ff921edd390>]

Since the latter approach resulted into broken mismatched pairs, looks like there are codes with no descriptions.

If you want to capture only the diagnosis codes that have descriptions (existing desc nodes), you can enforce this rule with the following XPath expression:

.//diag[name and desc]

The problem though is that xml.etree.ElementTree supports a limited set of XPath features and for this particular expression to work, you need to switch to lxml.etree. But, it will come with a performance boost, better memory usage and a richer functionality. It's worth it.

You can also simplify the way you extract codes by using findtext() and a dictionary comprehension:

from pprint import pprint

import lxml.etree as ET


data = """your XML here"""
root = ET.fromstring(data)

result = {diag.findtext("name"): diag.findtext("desc")
          for diag in root.xpath(".//diag[name and desc]")}

pprint(result)

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('./all_foods.xml')
my_text = [item.text for item in tree.iter()]

This will give you list of text that you want. If you want some specific text you can use

my_tags = [item.text for item in tree.iter() if item.text == "title1"]

You could consider using xpath in lxml. Using text() enables you to find 'Panama' as the content of an element quickly. Once you have done that you can navigate to neighbouring information items for the same country.

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> tree = etree.parse('test.xml')
>>> tree.xpath('.//name/text()')
['Liechtenstein', 'Singapore', 'Panama']
>>> for item in tree.xpath('.//name/text()'):
...     if item == 'Panama':
...         for cousins in item.getparent().getparent().getchildren():
...             cousins.text
...             
'Panama'
'68'
'2011'
'13600'