In Python - Parsing a response xml and finding a specific text vaule

Question

I'm new to python and I'm having a particularly difficult time working with xml and python. The situation I have is this, I'm trying to count the number of times a word appears in an xml document. Simple enough, but the xml document is a response from a server. Is it possible to do this without writing to a file? It would be great trying to do it from memory.

Here is a sample xml code:

<xml>
  <title>Info</title>
    <foo>aldfj</foo>
      <data>Text I want to count</data>
</xml>

Here is what I have in python

import urllib2
import StringIO
import xml.dom.minidom
from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse
usock = urllib.urlopen('http://www.example.com/file.xml') 
xmldoc = minidom.parse(usock)
print xmldoc.toxml()

Past This point I have tried using StringIO, ElementTree, and minidom to no success and I have gotten to a point where I'm not sure what else to do.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

It's quite simple, as far as I can tell:

import urllib2
from xml.dom import minidom

usock = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/file.xml') 
xmldoc = minidom.parse(usock)

for element in xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('data'):
  print element.firstChild.nodeValue

So to count the occurrences of a string, try this (a bit condensed, but I like one-liners):

count = sum(element.firstChild.nodeValue.find('substring') for element in xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('data'))

Answer 2

If you are just trying to count the number of times a word appears in an XML document, just read the document as a string and do a count:

import urllib2
data = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/file.xml').read()
print data.count('foobar')

Otherwise, you can just iterate through the tags you are looking for:

from xml.etree import cElementTree as ET
xml = ET.fromstring(urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.com/file.xml').read())
for data in xml.getiterator('data'):
    # do something with
    data.text