CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlpython-2.7xml-parsingmediawikimediawiki-api
user1943079
user1943079

Reputation: 523

how to parse through this xml?

Suppose I have the following XML response from mediawiki api. I want to find out the earliest date that the wiki topic was revised, which in this case is 2005-08-23. How do I parse through the xml to find that out. I'm using python btw.

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <api>
      <query-continue>
        <revisions rvcontinue="46214352" />
      </query-continue>
      <query>
        <pageids>
          <id>2516600</id>
        </pageids>
        <pages>
          <page pageid="2516600" ns="0" title="!Kung language">
            <revisions>
              <rev timestamp="2005-08-23T00:58:40Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2005-08-23T01:01:00Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2005-09-02T07:21:37Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2005-09-02T07:24:28Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-01-06T07:45:35Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-03-22T09:03:23Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-03-30T05:50:12Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-03-30T20:33:22Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-03-30T20:35:05Z" />
              <rev timestamp="2006-03-30T20:37:16Z" />
            </revisions>
          </page>
        </pages>
      </query>
    </api>

I tried the following

revisions = text.getElementsByTagName("revisions")
for x in revisions:
    children = x.childNodes
    for y in children:
        print y.nodeValue

but all this does is print None.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 54

Answers (1)

Blender
Blender

Reputation: 298256

I would use lxml with an XPath expression:

from lxml import etree

root = etree.fromstring(xml)
timestamps = root.xpath('//rev/@timestamp')

As for your code, you aren't getting the attribute of the element. To do that, use getAttribute:

print y.getAttribute('timestamp')

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions