Reading XML using Python minidom and iterating over each node

Question

I have an XML structure that looks like the following, but on a much larger scale:

<root>     <conference name='1'>         <author>             Bob         </author>         <author>             Nigel         </author>     </conference>     <conference name='2'>         <author>             Alice         </author>         <author>             Mary         </author>     </conference> </root> 

For this, I used the following code:

dom = parse(filepath) conference=dom.getElementsByTagName('conference') for node in conference:     conf_name=node.getAttribute('name')     print conf_name     alist=node.getElementsByTagName('author')     for a in alist:         authortext= a.nodeValue         print authortext 

However, the authortext that is printed out is 'None.' I tried messing around with using variations like what is below, but it causes my program to break.

authortext=a[0].nodeValue 

The correct output should be:

1 Bob Nigel 2 Alice Mary 

But what I get is:

1 None None 2 None None 

Any suggestions on how to tackle this problem?

Answer 1

your authortext is of type 1 (ELEMENT_NODE), normally you need to have TEXT_NODE to get a string. This will work

a.childNodes[0].nodeValue