Editing XML as a dictionary in python?

Question

I\'m trying to generate customized xml files from a template xml file in python.

Conceptually, I want to read in the template xml, remove some elements, change some

Answer 1

This'll get you a dict minus attributes... dunno if this is useful to anyone. I was looking for an xml to dict solution myself when i came up with this.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

tree = etree.parse('test.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

def xml_to_dict(el):
  d={}
  if el.text:
    d[el.tag] = el.text
  else:
    d[el.tag] = {}
  children = el.getchildren()
  if children:
    d[el.tag] = map(xml_to_dict, children)
  return d

This: http://www.w3schools.com/XML/note.xml

 Tove
 Jani
 Reminder
 Don't forget me this weekend!

Would equal this:

{'note': [{'to': 'Tove'},
          {'from': 'Jani'},
          {'heading': 'Reminder'},
          {'body': "Don't forget me this weekend!"}]}