[Tutor] Issues Parsing XML

[Stefan Behnel]

marc at marcd.org wrote:
> I am new to Python and as a first project decided to try to parse an XML
> report using Python.  I have the following, which works to extract one
> element.  I am stuck, however, at one element.  I want to extract several
> differenct elements per line, creating a comma separated variable (CSV)
> line that can be imported to a spreadsheet.  Not all elements are in each
> line or part of the XML document - so if an element is not in a line, I
> would leave a blank (2 commas).  I can probably figure that out - it's the
> extracting multiple elements and putting them in one line that has me
> stumped.  Help would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.  What I have so
> far (and I would like to stick to the DOM model):

There is another "DOM Model" in the stdlib. It's called ElementTree and is
generally a lot easier to use. For example, to find the text content of an
element called "element_that_has_text_content" in a subtree below
"some_element", you can do

	print some_element.findtext(".//element_that_has_text_content")

Stefan