Converting xml to dictionary using ElementTree

Question

I'm looking for an XML to dictionary parser using ElementTree, I already found some but they are excluding the attributes, and in my case I have a lot of attributes.

Answer 1

The following XML-to-Python-dict snippet parses entities as well as attributes following this XML-to-JSON "specification":

from collections import defaultdict  def etree_to_dict(t):     d = {t.tag: {} if t.attrib else None}     children = list(t)     if children:         dd = defaultdict(list)         for dc in map(etree_to_dict, children):             for k, v in dc.items():                 dd[k].append(v)         d = {t.tag: {k: v[0] if len(v) == 1 else v                      for k, v in dd.items()}}     if t.attrib:         d[t.tag].update(('@' + k, v)                         for k, v in t.attrib.items())     if t.text:         text = t.text.strip()         if children or t.attrib:             if text:                 d[t.tag]['#text'] = text         else:             d[t.tag] = text     return d 

It is used:

from xml.etree import cElementTree as ET e = ET.XML(''' <root>   <e />   <e>text</e>   <e name="value" />   <e name="value">text</e>   <e> <a>text</a> <b>text</b> </e>   <e> <a>text</a> <a>text</a> </e>   <e> text <a>text</a> </e> </root> ''')  from pprint import pprint  d = etree_to_dict(e)  pprint(d) 

The output of this example (as per above-linked "specification") should be:

{'root': {'e': [None,                 'text',                 {'@name': 'value'},                 {'#text': 'text', '@name': 'value'},                 {'a': 'text', 'b': 'text'},                 {'a': ['text', 'text']},                 {'#text': 'text', 'a': 'text'}]}} 

Not necessarily pretty, but it is unambiguous, and simpler XML inputs result in simpler JSON. :)

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Update

If you want to do the reverse, emit an XML string from a JSON/dict, you can use:

try:   basestring except NameError:  # python3   basestring = str  def dict_to_etree(d):     def _to_etree(d, root):         if not d:             pass         elif isinstance(d, str):             root.text = d         elif isinstance(d, dict):             for k,v in d.items():                 assert isinstance(k, str)                 if k.startswith('#'):                     assert k == '#text' and isinstance(v, str)                     root.text = v                 elif k.startswith('@'):                     assert isinstance(v, str)                     root.set(k[1:], v)                 elif isinstance(v, list):                     for e in v:                         _to_etree(e, ET.SubElement(root, k))                 else:                     _to_etree(v, ET.SubElement(root, k))         else:             assert d == 'invalid type', (type(d), d)     assert isinstance(d, dict) and len(d) == 1     tag, body = next(iter(d.items()))     node = ET.Element(tag)     _to_etree(body, node)     return node  print(ET.tostring(dict_to_etree(d)))