Replacing an XML element?

[Nick Vargish]

I've been trying to figure out how to do something that seems
relatively simple, but it's just not coming together for me. I'm
hoping someone will deign to give me a little insight here.

The problem: We have XML documents that use a custom table format that
was designed primarily for typesetting documents. It's a column-first
oriented scheme, and now we need a way to convert these table elements
to HTML style row-first tables.

I would like to be able to do something like this:

doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse(input)
for table in doc.getElementsByTagName('COLTABLE'):
    newtable = coltable_to_rowtable(table)
    ## this is what I can't figure out
    doc.replace(table, newtable)
output.write(doc.toxml('utf-8'))

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something obvious, but haven't been able
to find any examples. 

Someone please whack me with a cluestick,

Nick

-- 
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int main(c,v)char *v;{return !c?putchar(*   /* cc -o sig sig.c */
v-1)&&main(0,v+1):main(0,"Ojdl!Wbshjti!=ojdlAwbshjti/psh?\v\1");}