CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlinuxxml-parsingubuntu-10.04
POOJA GUPTA
POOJA GUPTA

Reputation: 2355

extract text from xml documents in python

This is the sample xml document :

<bookstore>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>300.00</price>
    </book>

    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling </author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>625.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

I want to extract the text without specifying the elements how can i do this , because i have 10 such documents. I want so because my problem is that user is entering some word which I don't know , it has to be searched in all of the 10 xml documents in their respective text portions. For this to happen I should know where the text lies without knowing about the element. One more thing that all these documents are different.

Please Help!!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3589

Answers (3)

Bharat
Bharat

Reputation: 3000

If you want to call grep from inside python, see the discussion here, especially this post.

If you want to search through all the files in a directory you could try something like this using the glob module:

import glob    
import os    
import re    

p = re.compile('>.*<')    
os.chdir("./")    
for files in glob.glob("*.xml"):    
    file = open(files, "r")    
    line = file.read()    
    list =  map(lambda x:x.lstrip('>').rstrip('<'), p.findall(line))    
    print list    
    print

This searches iterates through all the files in the directory, opens each file and exteacts text matching the regexp.

Output:

['Everyday Italian', 'Giada De Laurentiis', '2005', '300.00', 'Harry Potter', 'J
 K. Rowling ', '2005', '625.00']

EDIT: Updated code to extract only the text elements from the xml.

Upvotes: 0

Burhan Khalid
Burhan Khalid

Reputation: 174622

You could simply strip out any tags:

>>> import re
>>> txt = """<bookstore>
...     <book category="COOKING">
...         <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
...         <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
...         <year>2005</year>
...         <price>300.00</price>
...     </book>
...
...     <book category="CHILDREN">
...         <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
...         <author>J K. Rowling </author>
...         <year>2005</year>
...         <price>625.00</price>
...     </book>
... </bookstore>"""
>>> exp = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
>>> text_only = exp.sub('',txt).strip()
>>> text_only
'Everyday Italian\n        Giada De Laurentiis\n        2005\n        300.00\n
  \n\n    \n        Harry Potter\n        J K. Rowling \n        2005\n        6
25.00'

But if you just want to search files for some text in Linux, you can use grep:

burhan@sandbox:~$ grep "Harry Potter" file.xml
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>

If you want to search in a file, use the grep command above, or open the file and search for it in Python:

>>> import re
>>> exp = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
>>> with open('file.xml') as f:
...     lines = ''.join(line for line in f.readlines())
...     text_only = exp.sub('',lines).strip()
...
>>> if 'Harry Potter' in text_only:
...    print 'It exists'
... else:
...    print 'It does not'
...
It exists

Upvotes: -1

Jon Clements
Jon Clements

Reputation: 142176

Using the lxml library with an xpath query is possible:

xml="""<bookstore>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>300.00</price>
    </book>

    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling </author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>625.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>
"""
from lxml import etree
root = etree.fromstring(xml).getroot()
root.xpath('/bookstore/book/*/text()')
# ['Everyday Italian', 'Giada De Laurentiis', '2005', '300.00', 'Harry Potter', 'J K. Rowling ', '2005', '625.00']

Although you don't get the category....

Upvotes: 2

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