1

I am aware of fetching values from xml of below format :

<note>
    <col1>Tove</col1>
    <col2>J</col2>
    <test2>
        <a> a </a>
        <b> b </b>
        <c> c </c>
        <d> d </d>
    </test2>
    <code
        a="1"
        b="2"
        c="3"
    />
    <heading>Reminder</heading>
    <body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>

i have extracted the value as below :

for a in xmls.getiterator():
    b = a.find("col1") # or col2
    if b is not None:
        print b.text  #this helps in extracting the value
        break

My problem is that i need to extract value in test2 and code node, but using above method, i am getting output as None

Expected output

ideally as below but getting direct node values like a,b,c,d,1,2,3 would be best

            <a> a </a>
            <b> b </b>
            <c> c </c>
            <d> d </d>

           and

            a="1"
            b="2"
            c="3"

What is native way to extract values in different type of values from xml if we have target node name?

Related :

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NoobEditor
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1 Answers1

1

I would use lxml.etree, .xpath() and .attrib to get the attribute values:

import lxml.etree as ET

data = """<note>
    <col1>Tove</col1>
    <col2>J</col2>
    <test2>
        <a> a </a>
        <b> b </b>
        <c> c </c>
        <d> d </d>
    </test2>
    <code
        a="1"
        b="2"
        c="3"
    />
    <heading>Reminder</heading>
    <body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
</note>
"""

tree = ET.fromstring(data)

for note in tree.xpath("//note"):
    test2_values = [value.strip() for value in note.xpath(".//test2/*/text()")]
    code_attrs = note.find("code").attrib

    print(test2_values)
    print(code_attrs)

Here, we are basically iterating over all note nodes (assuming there are multiple), getting the texts of all nodes under the inner test2 node and all attributes that a code node has.

Prints:

['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
{'b': '2', 'c': '3', 'a': '1'}
alecxe
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  • cool...makes sense....from iteration time POV, is it a heavy process assuming its parsing large xmls? – NoobEditor Dec 30 '15 at 06:16
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    @NoobEditor depends on how big of a problem it is (don't optimize prematurely, as you may remember). Also, you can iteratively parse the XML if needed, please see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9856163/using-lxml-and-iterparse-to-parse-a-big-1gb-xml-file and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324214/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-parse-large-xml-docs-in-python. – alecxe Dec 30 '15 at 06:26