CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlparsingbeautifulsouplxml
tijanicharles
tijanicharles

Reputation: 173

Removing a tag and its contents in xml using BeautifulSoup and lxml in Python

I am working with my Evernote data - extracted to an xml file. I have parsed the data using BeautifulSoup and here is a sampling of my xml data.

<note>
<title>
 Audio and camera roll from STUDY DAY! in San Francisco
</title>
<content>
<![CDATA[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM "http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml2.dtd">
<en-note><div><en-media type="image/jpeg" hash="e3a84de41c9886b93a6921413b8482d5" width="1080" style="" height="1920"/><en-media type="image/jpeg" hash="b907b22a9f2db379aec3739d65ce62db" width="1123" style="" height="1600"/><en-media type="audio/wav" hash="d3fdcd5a487531dc156a8c5ef6000764" style=""/><br/></div>

</en-note>
]]>
</content>
<created>
 20130217T153800Z
</created>
<updated>
 20130217T154311Z
</updated>
<note-attributes>
<latitude>
 37.78670730072799
</latitude>
<longitude>
 -122.4171893858559
</longitude>
<altitude>
 42
</altitude>
<source>
 mobile.iphone
</source>
<reminder-order>
 0
</reminder-order>
</note-attributes>
<resource>
<data encoding="base64">

There are two avenues I would like to explore here: 1. Finding and removing Specific tags (in this case ) 2. locating a group/list of tags to extract to another document

This is my current code which parses the xml prettifies it and outputs to a text file.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(open('myNotes.xml','r'))
with open("file.txt", "w") as f:
f.write(soup.prettify().encode('utf8'))

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2597

Answers (2)

Shankar ARUL
Shankar ARUL

Reputation: 13720

If you're using BeautifulSoup, you could use the getText() method to strip out the tags in the child elements and get one consolidated text

source.getText()

Upvotes: 1

peluzza
peluzza

Reputation: 329

You can search nodes by name

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(open('myNotes.xml', 'r'))


source = soup.source
print source

#<source>
# mobile.iphone
#</source>


source = soup.source
print source.string

# mobile.iphone

Another way to do it, findAll method:

for tag in soup.findAll('source'):
    print tag.string

if you want to print every node stripping tags, this should do the job:

for tag in soup.findAll():
    print tag.string

Hope it helps.

EDIT:________

BeautifulSoup asumes you know the structure, although by definition xml is a structured data storage. So you need to give a guideline to BS to parse your xml.

row = []
title = soup.note.title.string
created = soup.note.created.string
row.append(title)
row.append(created)

Now you only have to iterate over xml.

Upvotes: 2

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