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pythonxmlxml-parsingelementtree
eltaco431
eltaco431

Reputation: 850

Parsing nested XML with ElementTree

I have the following XML format, and I want to pull out the values for name, region, and status using python's xml.etree.ElementTree module.

However, my attempt to get this information has been unsuccessful so far.

<feed>
    <entry>
        <id>uuid:asdfadsfasdf123123</id>
        <title type="text"></title>
        <content type="application/xml">
            <NamespaceDescription xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <Name>instancename</Name>
                <Region>US</Region>
                <Status>Active</Status>
            </NamespaceDescription>
        </content>
    </entry>
    <entry>
        <id>uuid:asdfadsfasdf234234</id>
        <title type="text"></title>
        <content type="application/xml">
            <NamespaceDescription xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <Name>instancename2</Name>
                <Region>US2</Region>
                <Status>Active</Status>
            </NamespaceDescription>
        </content>
    </entry>
</feed>

My code attempt:

NAMESPACE = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}'
root = et.fromstring(XML_STRING)
entry_root = root.findall('{0}entry'.format(NAMESPACE))
for child in entry_root:
    content_node = child.find('{0}content'.format(NAMESPACE))
    for content in content_node:
        for desc in content.iter():
            print desc.tag
            name = desc.find('{0}Name'.format(NAMESPACE))
            print name

desc.tag is giving me the nodes I want to access, but name is returning None. Any ideas what's wrong with my code?

Output of desc.tag:

{http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect}Name
{http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect}Region
{http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect}Status

Upvotes: 3

Views: 12077

Answers (2)

eltaco431
eltaco431

Reputation: 850

I don't know why I didn't see this before. But, I was able to get the values.

root = et.fromstring(XML_STRING)
entry_root = root.findall('{0}entry'.format(NAMESPACE))
for child in entry_root:
    content_node = child.find('{0}content'.format(NAMESPACE))
    for descr in content_node:
        name_node = descr.find('{0}Name'.format(NAMESPACE))
        print name_node.text

Upvotes: 2

gtlambert
gtlambert

Reputation: 11961

You can use lxml.etree along with default namespace mapping to parse the XML as follows:

content = '''
<feed>
    <entry>
        <id>uuid:asdfadsfasdf123123</id>
        <title type="text"></title>
        <content type="application/xml">
            <NamespaceDescription xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <Name>instancename</Name>
                <Region>US</Region>
                <Status>Active</Status>
            </NamespaceDescription>
        </content>
    </entry>
    <entry>
        <id>uuid:asdfadsfasdf234234</id>
        <title type="text"></title>
        <content type="application/xml">
            <NamespaceDescription xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <Name>instancename2</Name>
                <Region>US2</Region>
                <Status>Active</Status>
            </NamespaceDescription>
        </content>
    </entry>
</feed>'''

from lxml import etree

tree = etree.XML(content)
ns = {'default': 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2010/10/servicebus/connect'}

names = tree.xpath('//default:Name/text()', namespaces=ns)
regions = tree.xpath('//default:Region/text()', namespaces=ns)
statuses = tree.xpath('//default:Status/text()', namespaces=ns)

print(names)
print(regions)
print(statuses)

Output

['instancename', 'instancename2']
['US', 'US2']
['Active', 'Active']

This XPath/namespace functionality can be adapted to output the data in any format you require.

Upvotes: 1

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