Extracting text from XML node with minidom

Question

I've looked through several posts but I haven't quite found any answers that have solved my problem.

Sample XML =

<TextWithNodes>
<Node id="0"/>TEXT1<Node id="19"/>TEXT2 <Node id="20"/>TEXT3<Node id="212"/>
</TextWithNodes>

So I understand that usually if I had extracted TextWithNodes as a NodeList I would do something like

nodeList = TextWithNodes[0].getElementsByTagName('Node')
for a in nodeList:
    node = a.nodeValue
    print node

All I get is None. I've read that you must write a.childNodes.nodeValue but there isn't a child node to the node list since it looks like all the Node Ids are closing tags? If I use a.childNodes I get [].

When I get the node type for a it is type 1 and TEXT_NODE = 3. I'm not sure if that is helpful.

I would like to extract TEXT1, TEXT2, etc.

Answer 1

A solution with lxml right from the docs:

from lxml import etree
from StringIO import StringIO

xml = etree.parse(StringIO('''<TextWithNodes>
<Node id="0"/>TEXT1<Node id="19"/>TEXT2 <Node id="20"/>TEXT3<Node id="212"/></TextWithNodes>'''))

xml.xpath("//text()")
Out[43]: ['\n', 'TEXT1', 'TEXT2 ', 'TEXT3']

You also can extract the text of an specific node:

xml.find(".//Node[@id='19']").text

The issue here is the text in the XML doesn't belong to any node.

Answer 2

You should use the ElementTree api instead of minidom for your task (as explained in the other answers here), but if you need to use minidom, here is a solution.

What you are looking for was added to DOM level 3 as the textContent attribute. Minidom only supports level 1.

However you can emulate textContent pretty closely with this function:

def textContent(node):
    if node.nodeType in (node.TEXT_NODE, node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE):
        return node.nodeValue
    else:
        return ''.join(textContent(n) for n in node.childNodes)

Which you can then use like so:

x = minidom.parseString("""<TextWithNodes>
<Node id="0"/>TEXT1<Node id="19"/>TEXT2 <Node id="20"/>TEXT3<Node id="212"/></TextWithNodes>""")

twn = x.getElementsByTagName('TextWithNodes')[0]

assert textContent(twn) == u'\nTEXT1TEXT2 TEXT3'

Notice how I got the text content of the parent node TextWithNodes. This is because your Node elements are siblings of those text nodes, not parents of them.