Plain old SAX and minidom useable? But how then?

[Carsten Haese]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 04:58 -0700, Dobedani wrote:
> [...]
> "Nelson says: There's the stock Python install, which barely does
> anything [for XML]. That's overstated. Plain old SAX and minidom may
> not be ideal, but they're useable."
> 
> Please: where then can I find examples of such use? If I cannot use
> xpath, I would not mind to browse a bit - e.g. using functions like
> getElementByTag() but I don't even know how to use those. TIA

Here's a micro-tutorial:

>>> import xml.dom.minidom
>>> contents = """\
... <root>
...   <thing>Parrot</thing>
...   <thing class="special">Holy Grail</thing>
... </root>"""
>>> dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(contents)
>>> things = dom.getElementsByTagName("thing")
>>> print things[0].childNodes
[<DOM Text node "Parrot">]
>>> print things[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
Parrot
>>> print things[0].hasAttribute("class")
False
>>> print things[0].getAttribute("class")

>>> print things[1].childNodes
[<DOM Text node "Holy Grail">]
>>> print things[1].childNodes[0].nodeValue
Holy Grail
>>> print things[1].hasAttribute("class")
True
>>> print things[1].getAttribute("class")
special

There's also the online documentation at
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-xml.dom.minidom.html

Hope this helps,

-- 
Carsten Haese
http://informixdb.sourceforge.net