[Tutor] Parsing an XML document using ElementTree

[Stefan Behnel]

Sithembewena Lloyd Dube, 25.05.2011 14:40:
> Thanks for all your suggestions. I read up on gzip and urllib and also
> learned in the process that I could use urllib2 as its the latest form of
> that library.
>
> Herewith my solution: I don't know how elegant it is, but it works just
> fine.
>
> def get_contests():
>       url = '
> http://xml.matchbook.com/xmlfeed/feed?sport-id=&vendor=TEST&sport-name=&short-name=Po
> '
>       req = urllib2.Request(url)
>       req.add_header('accept-encoding','gzip/deflate')
>       opener = urllib2.build_opener()
>       response = opener.open(req)

This is ok.


>       compressed_data = response.read()
>       compressed_stream = StringIO.StringIO(compressed_data)
>       gzipper = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=compressed_stream)
>       data = gzipper.read()

This should be simplifiable to

    uncompressed_stream = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=response)


>       current_path = os.path.realpath(MEDIA_ROOT + '/xml-files/d.xml')
>       data_file = open(current_path, 'w')
>       data_file.write(data)
>       data_file.close()
>       xml_data = ET.parse(open(current_path, 'r'))

And this subsequently becomes

    xml_data = ET.parse(uncompressed_stream)


>       contest_list = []
>       for contest_parent_node in xml_data.getiterator('contest'):

Take a look at ET.iterparse().


>            contest = Contest()
>            for contest_child_node in contest_parent_node:
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "name" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                      contest.name = contest_child_node.text
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "league" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                     contest.league = contest_child_node.text
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "acro" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                     contest.acro = contest_child_node.text
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "time" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                     contest.time = contest_child_node.text
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "home" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                     contest.home = contest_child_node.text
>                 if (contest_child_node.tag == "away" and
> contest_child_node.text is not None and contest_child_node.text != ""):
>                     contest.away = contest_child_node.text

This is screaming for a simplification, such as

    for child in contest_parent_node:
        if child.tag in ('name', 'league', ...): # etc.
            if child.text:
                setattr(context, child.tag, child.text)


Stefan