Change the XML structure to a new one with python

Question

I want to change the structure from an XML to another standard structure given to me. I believe I can achieve that through the following steps:

Get all the tags and their attributes, so I can know what to modify, remove or add.
Change the tags name (i.e. informaltable to table, or , sect1 to section)
Establish certain standard attributes for the different tags, and show it in a dictionary (i.e. all the section, title and table tags must have these attributes ---- section:{"xmlns:xsi","id","type","xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation"} , title:"id" , table:{"frame","id"} .
Give a random alpha-numerical id to every tag that has the id attribute and it must never repeat itself(i.e. id=id-824fc56b-431b-4ad3-e933-f0fc222e50d3)
Modify, add and remove attributes values for certain tags (i.e. frame was frame=all and now is frame=any) (i.e. delete the rowsep attribute in the colspec tag).
Remove specific tags(i.e. remove the anchor tags and of course all of their attributes) (I hope this doesn't affect the whole hierarchy).

I have this xml example


  
    <anchor id="_Toc493170182"/>
    <anchor id="__RefHeading___Toc3574_3674829928"/>
    <anchor id="_Toc72503731"/>
    <anchor id="_Toc69390724"/>
    <anchor id="_Toc493496869"/>
    Abbreviations of Terms
  
      
          
          
          
              
                
                  Abbreviation
                  
                
              
              
                
                  Definition
                  
                
              
            
              
                A/C
              
              
                AirCraft

And this is the code that I have so far

from lxml import etree
import numpy as np

#Parsing the xml file and creating lists
tree = etree.parse("InitialFile")
root = tree.getroot()
Lista = []
tags = []

#Get the unique tags values
for element in root.iter():
    Lista.append(element.tag)
tags = np.unique(Lista)

#Show the unique tag[attributes] pairs
for tag in tags:
    print(tag,root.xpath(f'//{tag}')[0].attrib.keys())
    
#Changes the tag name to the required's tag's name
for p in tree.findall(".//sect1"):
    p.tag = ("section")
for p in tree.findall(".//informaltable"):
    p.tag = ("table")    
    
#Modify the tag's attributes to its desired form
for cy in root.xpath('//section'):
    cy.attrib['xmlns:xsi']='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' #it doesnt accept : as part of the attribute's name and i don't know why
    cy.attrib['id']=random() #this doesn't work yet
    cy.attrib['type']='policy'
    cy.attrib['xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation']='urn:fontoxml:cpa.xsd:1.0'#it doesnt accept :as part of the attribute's name and i don't know why

#Modify the attributes values
for t in root.xpath('//title'):
    t.attrib['id']='random()
    
for p in root.xpath('//section'):
    p.attrib['id']=random()
    p.attrib['type']='policy'

for p in root.xpath('//table'):
    p.attrib['id']=random()
    
for ct in root.xpath('//colspec'):
    ct.attrib.pop("rowsep", None)

#Print the new xml to make sure it worked:
print(etree.tostring(root).decode())
    
tree.write("Final file.xml")

If you have any other ideas please feel free to share.

Change the XML structure to a new one with python

Answers (1)

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