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

My modification of Daniel's answer, to give a marginally neater dictionary:

def xml_to_dictionary(element):
    l = len(namespace)
    dictionary={}
    tag = element.tag[l:]
    if element.text:
        if (element.text == ' '):
            dictionary[tag] = {}
        else:
            dictionary[tag] = element.text
    children = element.getchildren()
    if children:
        subdictionary = {}
        for child in children:
            for k,v in xml_to_dictionary(child).items():
                if k in subdictionary:
                    if ( isinstance(subdictionary[k], list)):
                        subdictionary[k].append(v)
                    else:
                        subdictionary[k] = [subdictionary[k], v]
                else:
                    subdictionary[k] = v
        if (dictionary[tag] == {}):
            dictionary[tag] = subdictionary
        else:
            dictionary[tag] = [dictionary[tag], subdictionary]
    if element.attrib:
        attribs = {}
        for k,v in element.attrib.items():
            attribs[k] = v
        if (dictionary[tag] == {}):
            dictionary[tag] = attribs
        else:
            dictionary[tag] = [dictionary[tag], attribs]
    return dictionary

namespace is the xmlns string, including braces, that ElementTree prepends to all tags, so here I've cleared it as there is one namespace for the entire document

NB that I adjusted the raw xml too, so that 'empty' tags would produce at most a ' ' text property in the ElementTree representation

spacepattern = re.compile(r'\s+')
mydictionary = xml_to_dictionary(ElementTree.XML(spacepattern.sub(' ', content)))

would give for instance

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

it's designed for specific xml that is basically equivalent to json, should handle element attributes such as

elementContent

too

there's the possibility of merging the attribute dictionary / subtag dictionary similarly to how repeat subtags are merged, although nesting the lists seems kind of appropriate :-)