Really simple way to deal with XML in Python?

Question

Musing over a recently asked question, I started to wonder if there is a really simple way to deal with XML documents in Python. A pythonic way, if you will.

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Answer 1

If you don't mind using a 3rd party library, then BeautifulSoup will do almost exactly what you ask for:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulStoneSoup('''<snip>''')
>>> soup.xml_api_reply.weather.current_conditions.temp_f['data']
u'68'

Answer 2

I highly recommend lxml.etree and xpath to parse and analyse your data. Here is a complete example. I have truncated the xml to make it easier to read.

import lxml.etree

s = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xml_api_reply version="1">
  <weather module_id="0" tab_id="0" mobile_row="0" mobile_zipped="1" row="0" section="0" >
    <forecast_information>
      <city data="Mountain View, CA"/> <forecast_date data="2010-06-23"/>
    </forecast_information>
    <forecast_conditions>
      <day_of_week data="Sat"/>
      <low data="59"/>
      <high data="75"/>
      <icon data="/ig/images/weather/partly_cloudy.gif"/>
      <condition data="Partly Cloudy"/>
    </forecast_conditions>
  </weather>
</xml_api_reply>"""

tree = lxml.etree.fromstring(s)
for weather in tree.xpath('/xml_api_reply/weather'):
    print weather.find('forecast_information/city/@data')[0]
    print weather.find('forecast_information/forecast_date/@data')[0]
    print weather.find('forecast_conditions/low/@data')[0]
    print weather.find('forecast_conditions/high/@data')[0]

Answer 3

If you haven't already, I'd suggest looking into the DOM API for Python. DOM is a pretty widely used XML interpretation system, so it should be pretty robust.

It's probably a little more complicated than what you describe, but that comes from its attempts to preserve all the information implicit in XML markup rather than from bad design.

Answer 4

lxml has been mentioned. You might also check out lxml.objectify for some really simple manipulation.

>>> from lxml import objectify
>>> tree = objectify.fromstring(your_xml)
>>> tree.weather.attrib["module_id"]
'0'
>>> tree.weather.forecast_information.city.attrib["data"]
'Mountain View, CA'
>>> tree.weather.forecast_information.postal_code.attrib["data"]
'94043'

Answer 5

I found the following python-simplexml module, which in the attempts of the author to get something close to SimpleXML from PHP is indeed a small wrapper around ElementTree. It's under 100 lines but seems to do what was requested:

>>> import SimpleXml
>>> x = SimpleXml.parse(urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=94043'))
>>> print x.weather.current_conditions.temp_f['data']
58

Answer 6

I believe that the built in python xml module will do the trick. Look at "xml.parsers.expat"

xml.parsers.expat