How can I convert XML into a Python object?

Question

I need to load an XML file and convert the contents into an object-oriented Python structure. I want to take this:

<main>     <object1 attr="name">content</object> </main> 

And turn it into something like this:

main main.object1 = "content" main.object1.attr = "name" 

The XML data will have a more complicated structure than that and I can't hard code the element names. The attribute names need to be collected when parsing and used as the object properties.

How can I convert XML data into a Python object?

Answer 1

It's worth looking at lxml.objectify.

xml = """<main> <object1 attr="name">content</object1> <object1 attr="foo">contenbar</object1> <test>me</test> </main>"""  from lxml import objectify  main = objectify.fromstring(xml) main.object1[0]             # content main.object1[1]             # contenbar main.object1[0].get("attr") # name main.test                   # me 

Or the other way around to build xml structures:

item = objectify.Element("item") item.title = "Best of python" item.price = 17.98 item.price.set("currency", "EUR")  order = objectify.Element("order") order.append(item) order.item.quantity = 3 order.price = sum(item.price * item.quantity for item in order.item)  import lxml.etree print(lxml.etree.tostring(order, pretty_print=True)) 

Output:

<order>   <item>     <title>Best of python</title>     <price currency="EUR">17.98</price>     <quantity>3</quantity>   </item>   <price>53.94</price> </order> 

Answer 2

I've been recommending this more than once today, but try Beautiful Soup (easy_install BeautifulSoup).

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup  xml = """ <main>     <object attr="name">content</object> </main> """  soup = BeautifulSoup(xml) # look in the main node for object's with attr=name, optionally look up attrs with regex my_objects = soup.main.findAll("object", attrs={'attr':'name'}) for my_object in my_objects:     # this will print a list of the contents of the tag     print my_object.contents     # if only text is inside the tag you can use this     # print tag.string