xml.dom.minidom

[Peter Hansen]

joe user wrote:
> 
> <?xml version='1.0'?>
> <mydoc version="1.2">
>  <title text="testdocument" />
>  <text>
>   <data>
>    Hello World
>   </data>
>  </text>
>  <footer>
>   <data>
>    Hello Footer
>   </data>
>  </footer>
> </mydoc>
> 
> What I would like to do is to get the contents of the "<data>"-tag
> within the "<footer>"-tag.

The easiest way (for me at least) is to use XPath:

Python 2.2.1 (#34, Apr  9 2002, 19:34:33) [MSC 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
>>> import xml.dom.minidom
>>> d = xml.dom.minidom.parse(open('doc.xml'))
>>> d
<xml.dom.minidom.Document instance at 0x009BA340>
>>> d.normalize()
>>> import xml.xpath
>>> xml.xpath.Evaluate('//footer/data', d)
[<DOM Element: data at 10217408>]
>>> xml.xpath.Evaluate('//footer/data', d)[0].firstChild.data
u'\n                Hello Footer\n                  '

Alternatively you could muck with a lot of procedural code with DOM,
or some ugly SAX stuff...

-Peter