Walk through all XML nodes in an element-nested structure
I have this kind of XML structure (output from the Esprima ASL converted from JSON), it can get even more nested than this (ASL.xml):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<program>
<type>Program</type>
<body>
<type>VariableDeclaration</type>
<declarations>
<type>VariableDeclarator</type>
<id>
<type>Identifier</type>
<name>answer</name>
</id>
<init>
<type>BinaryExpression</type>
<operator>*</operator>
<left>
<type>Literal</type>
<value>6</value>
</left>
<right>
<type>Literal</type>
<value>7</value>
</right>
</init>
</declarations>
<kind>var</kind>
</body>
</program>
Usualy for XML I use the for node inroot.childNodes` but this works only for the direct children:
import xml.dom.minidom as md
dom = md.parse("ASL.xml")
root = dom.documentElement
for node in root.childNodes:
if node.nodeType == node.ELEMENT_NODE:
print node.tagName,"has value:", node.nodeValue:, "and is child of:",node.parentNode.tagName
How can I walk all the elements of the XML regardless how many nested elements are?
Answer
This is probably best achieved with a recursive function. Something like this should do it but I've not tested it so consider it pseudocode.
import xml.dom.minidom as md
def print_node(root):
if root.childNodes:
for node in root.childNodes:
if node.nodeType == node.ELEMENT_NODE:
print node.tagName,"has value:", node.nodeValue, "and is child of:", node.parentNode.tagName
print_node(node)
dom = md.parse("ASL.xml")
root = dom.documentElement
print_node(root)