[Tutor] Parsing XML with minidom - problem solved

[Danny Yoo]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Ertl, John wrote:

> I guess to get to the data I need to look at the childNode of each.
>
> each.childNodes[0].data



Hi John,

Yeah; the weird thing that trips everyone up at least once (... or
twice...  *grin*) in DOM xml is this: the text within each element is
itself a node.


In fact, it's very possible for something like:

    <foo>this is a test. can you see this?</foo>

to be made up of several child "text" nodes.  It's not sufficient just to
look at the first child node to get at the text --- although it works for
simple cases, it'll break if the text is long enough to be split into
separate child nodes.


See:

    http://www.python.org/doc/lib/dom-example.html

and, in particular, take a look at the "getText()" function and the way
that the example uses getText().


Hope this helps!