Parsing CDATA in xml with python

Question

I need to parse an XML file with a number of blocks of CDATA that I need to retain for later plotting:

<process id="process1"> <log name="name1" device="device1"><![CDATA[timestamp value]]]></log> <log name="name2" device="device2"><![CDATA[timestamp value, timestamp value, timestamp]]]></log> </process>

I will need to do this repeatedly and quickly, and I am looking for the best way to do this. I've read that ElementTree is the faster of the methods, but I am open to other suggestions.

Answer 1

Here are two examples of how to do it:

from lxml import etree
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ElementTree

CONTENT = """
<process id="process1">
 <log name="name1" device="device1"><![CDATA[timestamp value]]></log>
 <log name="name2" device="device2"><![CDATA[timestamp value, timestamp value, timestamp]]></log>
</process>
"""

def parse_with_lxml():
    root = etree.fromstring(CONTENT)
    for log in root.xpath("//log"):
        print log.text

def parse_with_stdlib():
    root = ElementTree.fromstring(CONTENT)
    for log in root.iter('log'):
        print log.text

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parse_with_lxml()
    parse_with_stdlib()

Output:

timestamp value
timestamp value, timestamp value, timestamp
timestamp value
timestamp value, timestamp value, timestamp

The text attribute it handles it in both cases.