How join elements based on the same tag within the same parent in XML Python?

Question

I have a long XML structured like this:

The actual XML is way longer and has more pages.

You can see the "size" tag has different sizes. I want to join the letters of the text tags within the tag that have the same sizes, keeping their order of appearance.

My expected output is an XML file:


  
    
      

          1
          sventura ] 
          sps. a 
          mi-

Important, the order of the characters has to be kept. I tried in many ways but with no success. How is it possible to achieve my desired output?

EDIT: I tried to compare the attributes like this, but I need to keep the tag:

  words = []
    root = ET.fromstring(xml)
    pages = root.findall('.//page')
    for page in pages:
        previous_key = None
        current_key = None
        texts = page.findall('.//text')
        for txt in texts:
            if previous_key:
                current_key = (txt.attrib.get('font',previous_key[0]),txt.attrib.get('size',previous_key[1]))
            else:
                current_key = (txt.attrib.get('font','empty'),txt.attrib.get('size','empty'))
            if current_key != previous_key:
                words.append([])
            words[-1].append(txt.text)
            previous_key = current_key

    for group in words:
        if group:
            print(''.join(group))

Alexandre B. · Accepted Answer

You can try the following approach:

Iterate over all new_line elements. For all these new_lines:
- Find all children text elements and save it in a list using findall.
- Iterate over the text_list with current and previous elements using zip (see this discussion for more details: zip(l[:-1], l[1:])
- Get the size of current and previous element
- If they are equals and not both null:
  - Get current and previous text
  - Add them to current element
  - Remove the previous element using remove

Code

import lxml.etree as etree

parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
tree = etree.parse('data.xml', parser)
root = tree.getroot()

# Iterate over //newline block
for new_line_block in tree.xpath('//new_line'):
    # Find all "test" element in the new_line block
    list_text_elts = new_line_block.findall('text')

    # Iterate over all of them with the current and previous ones
    for previous_text, current_text in zip(list_text_elts[:-1], list_text_elts[1:]):
        # Get size elements
        prev_size = previous_text.attrib.get('size')
        curr_size = current_text.attrib.get('size')
        # If they are equals and not both null
        if curr_size == prev_size and curr_size is not None:
            # Get current and previous text
            pt = previous_text.text if previous_text.text is not None else ""
            ct = current_text.text if current_text.text is not None else ""
            # Add them to current element
            current_text.text = pt + ct  
            # Remove preivous element             
            previous_text.getparent().remove(previous_text)


newtree = etree.tostring(root, encoding='utf-8', pretty_print=True)
newtree = newtree.decode("utf-8")

output.xml

I let you adapt it to process different pages !

How join elements based on the same tag within the same parent in XML Python?

Answers (1)

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