I have an XML structure which looks similar to:
<Store>
<foo>
<book>
<isbn>123456</isbn>
</book>
<title>XYZ</title>
<checkout>no</checkout>
</foo>
<bar>
<book>
<isbn>7890</isbn>
</book>
<title>XYZ2</title>
<checkout>yes</checkout>
</bar>
</Store>
Using xml.dom.minidom only (restrictions) i would like to
1)traverse through the XML file
2)Search/Get for particular element, depending on its parent
Example: checkout element for author1, isbn for author2
3)Change/Set that element's value
4)Write the new XML structure to a file
Can anyone help here?
Thank you!
UPDATE:
This is what i have done till now
import xml.dom.minidom
checkout = "yes"
def getLoneChild(node, tagname):
assert ((node is not None) and (tagname is not None))
elem = node.getElementsByTagName(tagname)
if ((elem is None) or (len(elem) != 1)):
return None
return elem
def getLoneLeaf(node, tagname):
assert ((node is not None) and (tagname is not None))
elem = node.getElementsByTagName(tagname)
if ((elem is None) or (len(elem) != 1)):
return None
leaf = elem[0].firstChild
if (leaf is None):
return None
return leaf.data
def setcheckout(node, tagname):
assert ((node is not None) and (tagname is not None))
child = getLoneChild(node, 'foo')
Check = getLoneLeaf(child[0],'checkout')
Check = tagname
return Check
doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse('test.xml')
root = doc.getElementsByTagName('Store')[0]
output = setcheckout(root, checkout)
tmp_config = '/tmp/tmp_config.xml'
fw = open(tmp_config, 'w')
fw.write(doc.toxml())
fw.close()
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "checkout". This script will find the element and alter the value of that element. Perhaps you can adapt it to your specific needs.
import xml.dom.minidom as DOM
# find the author as a child of the "Store"
def getAuthor(parent, author):
# by looking at the children
for child in [child for child in parent.childNodes
if child.nodeType != DOM.Element.TEXT_NODE]:
if child.tagName == author:
return child
return None
def alterElement(parent, attribute, newValue):
found = False;
# look through the child elements, skipping Text_Nodes
#(in your example these hold the "values"
for child in [child for child in parent.childNodes
if child.nodeType != DOM.Element.TEXT_NODE]:
# if the child element tagName matches target element name
if child.tagName == attribute:
# alter the data, i.e. the Text_Node value,
# which is the firstChild of the "isbn" element
child.firstChild.data = newValue
return True
else:
# otherwise look at all the children of this node.
found = alterElement(child, attribute, newValue)
if found:
break
# return found status
return found
doc = DOM.parse("test.xml")
# This assumes that there is only one "Store" in the file
root = doc.getElementsByTagName("Store")[0]
# find the author
# this assumes that there are no duplicate author names in the file
author = getAuthor(root, "foo")
if not author:
print "Author not found!"
else:
# alter an element
if not alterElement(author, "isbn", "987654321"):
print "isbn not found"
else:
# output the xml
tmp_config = '/tmp/tmp_config.xml'
f = open(tmp_config, 'w')
doc.writexml( f )
f.close()
The general idea is that you match the name of the author against the tagNames of the children of the "Store" element, then recurse through the children of the author, looking for a match against a target element tagName. There are a lot of assumptions made in this solution, but it may get you started. It's painful to try and deal with hierarchical structures like XML without using recursion.
Cheers, Phil
In retrospect there was an error in the "alterElement" function. I've fixed this (note the "found" variable")