A lot of times developers use REST services or other data feeds that move data using XML. I tried doing this today and noticed the lack of a simple, extremely easy to follow tutorial on how to parse XML using python.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | #import library to do http requests: import urllib2 #import easy to use xml parser called minidom: from xml.dom.minidom import parseString #all these imports are standard on most modern python implementations #download the file: file = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.somedomain.com/somexmlfile.xml') #convert to string: data = file.read() #close file because we dont need it anymore: file.close() #parse the xml you downloaded dom = parseString(data) #retrieve the first xml tag (<tag>data</tag>) that the parser finds with name tagName: xmlTag = dom.getElementsByTagName('tagName')[0].toxml() #strip off the tag (<tag>data</tag> ---> data): xmlData=xmlTag.replace('<tagName>','').replace('</tagName>','') #print out the xml tag and data in this format: <tag>data</tag> print xmlTag #just print the data print xmlData |
There you have it, that is all you need to do to get a value out of a simple web based xml file using python.
If you want to do it from a file you can do it in a similar fashion:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | #import easy to use xml parser called minidom: from xml.dom.minidom import parseString #all these imports are standard on most modern python implementations #open the xml file for reading: file = open('somexmlfile.xml','r') #convert to string: data = file.read() #close file because we dont need it anymore: file.close() #parse the xml you got from the file dom = parseString(data) #retrieve the first xml tag (<tag>data</tag>) that the parser finds with name tagName: xmlTag = dom.getElementsByTagName('tagName')[0].toxml() #strip off the tag (<tag>data</tag> ---> data): xmlData=xmlTag.replace('<tagName>','').replace('</tagName>','') #print out the xml tag and data in this format: <tag>data</tag> print xmlTag #just print the data print xmlData |
And thats all you need to know to do the same with a file on your local machine.
If you have any questions post some comments on this post, thanks.
