The easiest solution is probably using lxml, where you can set a parser option to ignore white space between elements: >>> from lxml import etree >>> parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True) >>> xml_str=””‘<root> >>> <head></head> >>> <content></content> >>> </root>”’ >>> elem = etree.XML(xml_str, parser=parser) >>> print etree.tostring(elem) <root><head/><content/></root> This will probably be enough for your needs, but … Read more
With help from @bobince’s answer and these two (setting attribute order, overriding module methods) I managed to get this monkey patched it’s dirty and I’d suggest using another module that better handles this scenario but when that isn’t a possibility: # ======================================================================= # Monkey patch ElementTree import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET def _serialize_xml(write, elem, encoding, qnames, … Read more
DOM and Sax interfaces for XML parsing are the classic ways to work with XML. Python had to provide those interfaces because they are well-known and standard. The ElementTree package was intended to provide a more Pythonic interface. It is all about making things easier for the programmer. Depending on your build, each of those … Read more
In concert with what mzjn said, if you do want to pass a string to etree.parse(), just wrap it in a StringIO object. Example: from lxml import etree from StringIO import StringIO myString = “<html><p>blah blah blah</p></html>” tree = etree.parse(StringIO(myString)) This method is used in the lxml documentation.
This compare function works for me: def elements_equal(e1, e2): if e1.tag != e2.tag: return False if e1.text != e2.text: return False if e1.tail != e2.tail: return False if e1.attrib != e2.attrib: return False if len(e1) != len(e2): return False return all(elements_equal(c1, c2) for c1, c2 in zip(e1, e2))
Tested with Python 2.7 and 3.5, the following code should work as intended. #!/usr/bin/env python # CommentedTreeBuilder.py from xml.etree import ElementTree class CommentedTreeBuilder(ElementTree.TreeBuilder): def comment(self, data): self.start(ElementTree.Comment, {}) self.data(data) self.end(ElementTree.Comment) Then, in the main code use parser = ElementTree.XMLParser(target=CommentedTreeBuilder()) as the parser instead of the current one. By the way, comments work correctly out of … Read more
All sub-elements (descendants) of elem: all_descendants = list(elem.iter()) A more complete example: >>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET >>> a = ET.Element(‘a’) >>> b = ET.SubElement(a, ‘b’) >>> c = ET.SubElement(a, ‘c’) >>> d = ET.SubElement(a, ‘d’) >>> e = ET.SubElement(b, ‘e’) >>> f = ET.SubElement(d, ‘f’) >>> g = ET.SubElement(d, ‘g’) >>> [elem.tag for elem … Read more
You can remove child elements with the according remove method. To remove an element you have to call its parents remove method. Unfortunately Element does not provide a reference to its parents, so it is up to you to keep track of parent/child relations (which speaks against your use of elem.findall()) A proposed solution could … Read more
This is a perfect task for a regular expression. import re def namespace(element): m = re.match(r’\{.*\}’, element.tag) return m.group(0) if m else ”
It seems to complain about \x08 you will need to escape that. Edit: Or you can have the parser ignore the errors using recover from lxml import etree parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True) etree.fromstring(xmlstring, parser=parser)