XML

Note

Also see some older notes at XML

Convert

To a dictionary using https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict:

pip install xmltodict

import xmltodict

tree = ElementTree.parse('your.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
return xmltodict.parse(root.text)

Escape

I used the following code to un-escape some XML:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
import xml.sax.saxutils as saxutils

tree = ElementTree.parse('your.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
text = saxutils.unescape(root.text)
root = ElementTree.fromstring(text)

Pretty

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from xml.dom import minidom

def prettify(elem):
    """Return a pretty-printed XML string for the Element."""
    rough_string = ElementTree.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

Traverse

Tip

Probaby easier to convert the XML to a dict. See Convert above.

python 3 code to traverse XML and display attributes:

from xml.etree import ElementTree

def trav(node, indent=0):
    for name, value in node.attrib.items():
        print('  ' * indent, name, ':', value)
    for c in node.getchildren():
        print('  ' * indent, c.tag, ':', c.text)
        trav(c, indent+1)

tree = ElementTree.parse('your.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
trav(root)

An older example:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('out.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
for e in root:
    print '-' * 79
    print e.tag
    for i in e:
        print i.tag, i.text
        if i.tag == 'town':
            print '------------------------ %s:  %s' % (i.tag, i.text,)
        if i.tag == 'outlet':
            print '------------------------ %s:  %s' % (i.tag, i.text,)
        if i.tag == 'dineOutId':
            print '------------------------ %s:  %s' % (i.tag, i.text,)