ANN: XMLRecord 0.1.1

[Thomas Weholt]

XMLRecord
Current version: 0.1.1, Alpha
License: Pythonic
Requirements: Python 2.x, pyxie from pyxie (http://pyxie.sourceforge.net )

XMLRecord takes a XML-document describing a record-like structure and turn
it into an object similar to a dataset found in VBScript. It reads the XML
sequentially and parses each "record" into a DOM-object using the
minidom-module. Provided helper-methods makes it easy to extract values of
tags, attributes and list-structures.

XMLRecord is inspired by RAX
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/04/26/rax/index.html ).
It didn't handle lists the way I wanted so I made XMLRecord. Pyxies
simplistic syntax made it easy to parse.

It works on XML-structures like this (info in this xml-piece is fictional. )
:

<doc>

  <rec>
    <name>Thomas</name>
    <age type="int">26</age>
    <features>
        <feature>short</feature>
        <feature>fat</feature>
        <feature>dumb</feature>
    </features>
    <email>thomas at weholt.org</email>
  </rec>

  <rec>
    <name>Roger Wilco</name>
    <age type="int" dummy="test">30</age>
    <features>
        <feature>tall</feature>
        <feature>slim</feature>
        <feature>smart</feature>
    </features>
    <email>roger at wilco.com</email>
  </rec>

  <rec>
    <name>Dilbert</name>
    <age>32</age>
    <features/>
    <email/>
  </rec>

  <rec>
    <name>Mr Johnson</name>
    <age>47</age>
    <features/>
    <email>johnson at mail.com</email>
  </rec>

</doc>

To use XMLRecord, do something like this ( source edited to fit page ) :

    # xml_data is a string containing the XML above
    import XMLRecord
    x = XMLRecord.XMLRecord('rec', xml_data)
    while not x.eof:
        print "Name = %s, age = %s" % (x.getTagValue('name'),
x.getTagValue('age'))
        x.nextRecord()

The result:


    Name = Thomas, age = 26
    Name = Roger Wilco, age = 30
    Name = Dilbert, age = 32
    Name = Mr Johnson, age = 47

XMLRecord also provides a helper-method getListFromTag that constructs a
list of items from a piece of XML like this:

   <features>
        <feature>short</feature>
        <feature>fat</feature>
        <feature>dumb</feature>
    </features>

into this
   ['short','fat','dumb']

The tags inside the tag marking up the list don't have to have the same name
as long as the piece of xml is well-formed. One could easily use something
like this :

   <features>
        <item>short</item>
        <something>fat</something>
        <foo>dumb</foo>
    </features>

The available helper methods so far is:

getAttributeFromTag(self, tag, attr)
getAttributesFromTag(self, tag)
getTagValue(self, tag)
getListFromTag(self, tag)

Tips and comments are very welcome. Source is available at
http://projects.weholt.org

Thomas Weholt,
thomas at weholt.org