Adding to dictionary within for loop: not incrementing

Question

Essentially, I want to store the following XML input into a dictionary.

Extract of input (variable xml_tree)

<listingContentIndexEntry>
    <active>true</active>
    <lastUpdatedDate>2015-05-05</lastUpdatedDate>
    <listingHomeAwayId>/listings/0000/2671f21e-16a7-45c9-a6b7-d94ca801db24</listingHomeAwayId>
    <listingUrl>http://www.a.url</listingUrl>
</listingContentIndexEntry>
<listingContentIndexEntry>
    <active>true</active>
    <lastUpdatedDate>2015-05-05</lastUpdatedDate>
    <listingHomeAwayId>/listings/0000/849302c1-8734-4540-8169-57d71a309dc8</listingHomeAwayId>
    <listingUrl>http://www.a.url</listingUrl>
</listingContentIndexEntry>
<listingContentIndexEntry>
    <active>true</active>
    <lastUpdatedDate>2015-05-05</lastUpdatedDate>
    <listingHomeAwayId>/listings/0000/7fbfa33c-3371-4850-9c21-6a7685dd0ae1</listingHomeAwayId>
    <listingUrl>http://www.a.url</listingUrl>
</listingContentIndexEntry>
<listingContentIndexEntry>
    <active>false</active>
    <lastUpdatedDate>2015-05-05</lastUpdatedDate>
    <listingHomeAwayId>/listings/0000/336b4e46-e710-49a0-a192-ab66e320fe89</listingHomeAwayId>
    <listingUrl>http://www.a.url</listingUrl>
</listingContentIndexEntry>
<listingContentIndexEntry>
.........

My code so far is

xml_tree = ET.fromstring(xml)

#parse xml
for listingContentIndexEntry in xml_tree.iter('listingContentIndexEntry'):
    active = listingContentIndexEntry.find('active').text
    lastUpdatedDate = listingContentIndexEntry.find('lastUpdatedDate').text
    listingId = listingContentIndexEntry.find('listingId').text
    listingUrl = listingContentIndexEntry.find('listingUrl').text


    data = {'listingId':listingId,'active': active,'lastupdateDate': lastUpdatedDate}
    id_dict.update(data)

The data is being read in from the XML correctly (I have printed to screen) but when I print the dictionary, it is only showing one entry when there should be several hundred.

{'lastupdateDate': '2015-06-23', 'listingId': '/listings/0000/c5666884-c74f-4b89-831a-e285720e611c', 'active': 'false'}

How can I add mutiple entries to the dictionary?

You store only ONE data in your code... `.update` will always refresh the same dict object ... — LittleQ, Jun 24 '15 at 07:08
It seems like you want something like a list of dictionaries. — Sam, Jun 24 '15 at 07:10
please post a sample of what the correct result would look like. — krethika, Jun 24 '15 at 07:11

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 24 '15 at 07:23

dict.update method just adds the new elements of dictionary to previous dict, and also updates already set values if same key is encountered in old dict.

dict1 = {'Name': 'Zara', 'Age': 7}
dict2 = {'Sex': 'female', 'Age':19 }

dict1.update(dict2)
print "Value : %s" %  dict1

Output is :

Value : {'Age': 19, 'Name': 'Zara', 'Sex': 'female'}

You see here the old age is replaced by new age. Similarly in your code new keys are not being set, always previous set keys are being updated. If you would like to get all results make change id_dict to id_list a list and use id_list.append(data) insted.

Thank you, I did this using the info in this answer http://stackoverflow.com/a/23826330/545966 — Franco, Jun 25 '15 at 02:02

Adding to dictionary within for loop: not incrementing

1 Answers1