CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlparsingxml-parsing
user1703361
user1703361

Reputation: 85

Parsing XML with Python ElementTree with incorrect tags

I am trying to use Python to parse an XML file to get the title, author, URL, and summary out of the XML feed. Then I ensure The XML where we are gathering the data is like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
  xmlns:grddl="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#"
  grddl:transformation="2turtle_xslt-1.0.xsl">

<title>Our Site RSS</title>
<link href="http://www.oursite.com" />
<updated>2013-08-14T20:05:08-04:00</updated>
<id>urn:uuid:c60d7202-9a58-46a6-9fca-f804s879f5ebc</id>
<rights>
    Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative
    Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported),
    except where noted.
</rights>

<entry>
    <title>Headline #1</title>
    <author>
        <name>John Smith</name>
    </author>
    <link rel="alternate"
          href="http://www.oursite.com/our-slug/" />
    <id>1234</id>
    <updated>2013-08-13T23:45:43-04:00</updated>

    <summary type="html">
        Here is a summary of our story
    </summary>
</entry>
<entry>
    <title>Headline #2</title>
    <author>
        <name>John Smith</name>
    </author>
    <link rel="alternate"
          href="http://www.oursite.com/our-slug-2/" />
    <id>1235</id>
    <updated>2013-08-13T23:45:43-04:00</updated>

    <summary type="html">
        Here is a summary of our second story
    </summary>
</entry>

My code is:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

for child in root:
    print child.tag

Instead of the tag being "entry" the tag is "{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry" when the Python print child.tag. I had tried to use:

for entry in root.findall('entry'):

But that doesn't work since the tag for entry includes the w3 url that is part of the root tag. Also, getting the grandchildren of root shows their tag as "{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}author"

I can't change the XML, but how can I modify it (setting the root just to ) and re-save it or alter my code so that root.findall('entry') works?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2167

Answers (2)

B.Mr.W.
B.Mr.W.

Reputation: 19648

Try BeautifulSoup4, it is very powerful not only to parse XML but also HTML etc. Here is a to-go code, hope can be helpful.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def main():
    input = """....""" 
    soup = BeautifulSoup(input)   
    for entry in soup.findAll("entry"):
        title = entry.find("title").text.strip()
        author = entry.find("author").text.strip()
        link  = entry.find("link").text.strip()
        summary = entry.find("summary").text.strip()
        print title, author, link, summary
if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Upvotes: 1

Joseph Dunn
Joseph Dunn

Reputation: 1308

This is standard ElementTree behavior. If the tags you're searching for are declared within a namespace, you have to specify that namespace when you search for those tags. However, you can do something like this:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

def prepend_ns(s):
    return '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}' + s

for entry in root.findall(prepend_ns('entry')):
    print 'Entry:'
    print '    Title: '   + entry.find(prepend_ns('title')).text
    print '    Author: '  + entry.find(prepend_ns('author')).find(prepend_ns('name')).text
    print '    URL: '     + entry.find(prepend_ns('link')).attrib['href']
    print '    Summary: ' + entry.find(prepend_ns('summary')).text

Upvotes: 5

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