I’ve never had to do any amount of XML parsing — everything I have done has come from “seat of the pants” grepping/str().search/etc. A few months ago, I had to break down and start seriously walking/consuming XML streams/files as part of a project.
At that time, I found elementtree to be the “easiest” for me to understand. Admittedly, I was really ab(using) — I had something to ship, and ship fast.
Well, all things come in cycles. I’m back to writing a “consumer” library that consumes various XML sources and returns something “more human parseable” (building tools for new python/programming people), and we’re back to elementree.
I know that in py2.5, it’s in the xml.etree package, but we won’t be switching off py2.4 for some time.
I started this module a day ago with typical hacking gusto:
tree = ElementTree.fromstring(xml)
for node in self.tree.getchildren():
…parse code
for x in node.getchildren():
for y in x.getchildren():
…And so on. It was a mess. Then I re(read) the ElemenTree docs, and a lightbulb went off. With things like tree.attrib, tree.getiterator(“node”), and the like I compressed/ditched a bunch of slow, unwieldy (and gross) and replaces it with a few generators, and some attrib/k,v items calls.
I can’t recommend the package enough. For someone like me not heavily versed in XML consumption the ease of use and power of ElementTree can’t be stressed.