Python XML File Open

Question

I am trying to open an xml file and parse it, but when I try to open it the file never seems to open at all it just keeps running, any ideas?

from xml.dom import minidom
Test_file = open('C::/test_file.xml','r')
xmldoc = minidom.parse(Test_file)

Test_file.close()

for i in xmldoc:
     print('test')

The file is 180.288 KB, why does it never make it to the print portion?

Answer 1

Running your Python code with a few adjustments:

from xml.dom import minidom
Test_file = open('C:/test_file.xml','r')
xmldoc = minidom.parse(Test_file)

Test_file.close()

def printNode(node):
  print node
  for child in node.childNodes:
       printNode(child)

printNode(xmldoc.documentElement)

With this sample input as test_file.xml:

<a>
  <b>testing 1</b>
  <c>testing 2</c>
</a>

Yields this output:

<DOM Element: a at 0xbc56e8>
<DOM Text node "u'\n  '">
<DOM Element: b at 0xbc5788>
<DOM Text node "u'testing 1'">
<DOM Text node "u'\n  '">
<DOM Element: c at 0xbc5828>
<DOM Text node "u'testing 2'">
<DOM Text node "u'\n'">

Notes:

• As @LukeWoodward mentioned, avoid DOM-based libraries for large inputs, however 180K should be fine. For 180M, control may never return from minidom.parse() without running out of memory first (MemoryError).
• As @alecxe mentioned, you should eliminate the extraneous ':' in the file spec. You should have seen error output along the lines of IOError: [Errno 22] invalid mode ('r') or filename: 'C::/test_file.xml'.
• As @mzjn mentioned, xml.dom.minidom.Document is not iterable. You should have seen error output along the lines of TypeError: iteration over non-sequence.