tree representation of Python data
Thomas Passin
list1 at tompassin.net
Wed Feb 8 09:37:19 EST 2023
On 2/8/2023 6:39 AM, Shaozhong SHI wrote:
> What is the robust way to use Python to read in an XML and turn it into
> a JSON file?
>
> JSON dictionary is actually a tree. It is much easier to manage the
> tree-structured data.
XML and JSON are both for interchanging data. What are you trying to
accomplish? XML elements form a tree, XML attributes can be thought of
as a dictionary. JSON can contain both lists and associative arrays
(dictionaries). Personally, I would not say it's easier to "manage"
tree-structured data than dictionaries, but either way it sounds like
you want to send or receive data, rather than "managing" data in program
data structures.
So why do you want to convert data in XML form to JSON? Once you have
XML ingested into some Python data structure, you can use the json
library to output JSON- see
https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html
There is a pip-installable program (which I have never used), xmltodict,
that stores an XML file as a Python dictionary. You then can write it
to JSON as above. I don't know how general this program is - XML is not
isomorphic to JSON, but maybe your XML sources never use anything
besides elements and attributes, and don't use namespaces. Then it's
pretty easy.
More information about the Python-list
mailing list