Simple XML Processing With elementtree
Fredrik Lundh, well known in Python circles as "the effbot", has been an important contributor to Python and to PyXML. He has also developed a variety of useful tools, many of which involve Python and XML. One of these is elementtree, a collection of lightweight utilities for XML processing. elementtree is centered around a data structure for representing XML. As its name implies, this data structure is a hierarchy of objects, each of which represents an XML element. The focus is squarely on elements: there is no zoo of node types. Element objects themselves act as Python dictionaries of the XML attributes and Python lists of the element children. Text content is represented as simple data members on element instances. elementtree is about as pythonic as it gets, offering a fresh perspective on Python-XML processing, especially after the DOM explorations of my previous columns.
elementtree is very easy to set up. I downloaded version 1.1b3 (you can always find the latest version on the effbot download page). You need Python 2.1 (or newer); I used 2.2.1. Installation was a simple matter of unzipping the package and invoking distutils:
python setup.py installYou must have pyexpat in order to use elementtree, either as part of your Python installation itself or by installing PyXML.
XML made even easier
Listing 1 is a sample document (memo.xml) that I will use in this article.
Listing 1 (memo.xml): a sample XML file
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<memo>
<title>With Usura Hath no Man a House of Good Stone</title>
<date form="ISO-8601">2003-02-01</date>
<to>The Art World</to>
<body>
It appears that with the unfortunate recent United States
Supreme Court ruling in <cite>Eldred vs. Ashcroft</cite>, the
basis for creative expression, and the general gain of society
in such expression is <strong>forfeit</strong> to crude commercial
interest.
</body>
</memo> The primary benefit of elementtree is simplicity. Listing 2 reads the XML document in Listing 1 into the elementtree data structure and then writes it back out as XML.
Listing 2 (listing2.py): XML round trip using elementtreeimport sys
#Most common APIs are available on the ElementTree class
from elementtree.ElementTree import ElementTree
#create an ElementTree instance from an XML file
doc = ElementTree(file="memo.xml")
#write out XML from the ElementTree instance
doc.write(sys.stdout) elementtree is fast and lightweight. I tested it with Elliotte Rusty Harold's 1998 baseball stats, Hamlet, and the Old Testament from John Bosak's Revised XML Document Collections. These are the same large files I used in the last article to explore the performance of various iteration techniques. Using very crude benchmarks, while simply parsing, ElementTree was about 30% slower than cDomlette, but it also used about 30% less memory, which is very impressive for an XML data structure in pure Python (the parser is a different matter, using pyexpat, which is written in C).
elementtree also offers access to nodes of the XML tree using specialized Python objects, which are not based on DOM. elementtree uses its freedom from DOM to adopt the most pythonic idioms available. Iterators, in particular, are the core mechanism for navigating ElementTree instances. As an example, listing 3 displays information about all elements in the example document.
Listing 3 (listing3.py): displaying the content of the XML documentimport sys
from elementtree.ElementTree import ElementTree
root = ElementTree(file=sys.argv[1])
#Create an iterator
iter = root.getiterator()
#Iterate
for element in iter:
#First the element tag name
print "Element:", element.tag
#Next the attributes (available on the instance itself using
#the Python dictionary protocol
if element.keys():
print "\tAttributes:"
for name, value in element.items():
print "\t\tName: '%s', Value: '%s'"%(name, value)
#Next the child elements and text
print "\tChildren:"
#Text that precedes all child elements (may be None)
if element.text:
text = element.text
text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text
print "\t\tText:", repr(text)
if element.getchildren():
#Can also use: "for child in element.getchildren():"
for child in element:
#Child element tag name
print "\t\tElement", child.tag
#The "tail" on each child element consists of the text
#that comes after it in the parent element content, but
#before its next sibling.
if child.tail:
text = child.tail
text = len(text) > 40 and text[:40] + "..." or text
print "\t\tText:", repr(text) This gives you a quick look at the very pythonic read API for
elementtree objects. Each element object can be accessed using the Python
dictionary protocol to access its attributes and the sequence protocol to
access its children. The main quirk in this API is how mixed content is
handled. Each element only directly stores the portion of its text
content that precedes any child elements. It leaves the storage of all
its other text to its children. Each child element stores any text that
follows it in its parent node (tail). The comments in the
elementtree code are actually misleading on this point; I suspect they are
out of date. And there are a few other points of confusion in the
comments, so do be careful. Running the script in Listing 3 against the
document in Listing 1, I get:
$ python listing3.py memo.xml
Element: memo
Children:
Text: '\n'
Element title
Text: '\n'
Element date
Text: '\n'
Element to
Text: '\n'
Element body
Text: '\n'
Element: title
Children:
Text: 'With Usura Hath no Man a House of Good S...'
Element: date
Attributes:
Name: 'form', Value: 'ISO-8601'
Children:
Text: '2003-02-01'
Element: to
Children:
Text: 'The Art World'
Element: body
Children:
Text: '\nIt appears that with the unfortunate re...'
Element cite
Text: ', the\nbasis for creative expression, and...'
Element strong
Text: ' to crude commercial\ninterest.\n'
Element: cite
Children:
Text: 'Eldred vs. Ashcroft'
Element: strong
Children:
Text: 'forfeit' Pages: 1, 2 |
