[Tutor] Reading and Manipulating XML Data

[Alan Gauld]

"Luis Galvan" <cynicalairrick at gmail.com> wrote

> little foggy to me, which is where I need help.  The 'net always gives me 
> an
> exaggerated technical answer that is simply way over my head, so I'm 
> asking,
> does parsing mean to read and manipulate data?  If not, can someone 
> provide
> an answer in lay man's terms?

Others are better qualified than me to answer this but I'll have a
go anyway... Parsing is about taking raw datya and making
sense of it.. To try to turn a stream of data into meaningful
tokens or values. The stream needs to be in a clearly defined
structure (such as XML or a programming language grammar).
The parser reads the stream and breaks it into meaningful values,
such as tags etc for XML. It will usually build these up as a tree
structure so that you can navigate the tree to locate sopecific
bits of information. Thats as simple as I can describe it. If that's
too basic come back with more specific questions.

> The last part of my question brings me back to the first part of this
> message.  I can't seem to find any documentation on the internet that is
> ideal to the beginning programmer regarding XML parsing.

Have you read the ElementTree tutorial by Fred Lundh?
Its fairly comprehensive and etree comes as opart of the
standard Python library. I'd certainly recommend etree over minidom!

http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

> ...what are some decent python xml parsing guides out
> there?  Any help is much appreciated!

You could try reading Text Processing in Python which is a book
but also available online at:

http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/

HTH,


-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/