Question

Brand new to XML parsing. What would be the best way in python to parse something like:

<Item name="item1">
    <data>item1data</data>
    <subItems>
        <Item name="item2">
            <data>item2data</data>
            <subItems>
                <Item name="item3">
                  . . .
                </Item>
            </subItems>
        </Item>
        <Item name="item4">
          . . .
        </Item>
    <subItems>
</Item>

I was looking at xml.sax parsing, but couldn’t figure out how to enable it to do multiple levels of parsing down the subItems trees. Could someone give me a recommendation of a parser/method to parse this? Thank you!

I will be creating lists of ‘Item’ objects with this, expected results would loopks something like this:

[Item(item1, item1data, 
    [Item(item2, item2data, 
        [Item(item3 ... ]) Item(item4 ... )])]`

Answer 1

One of the best ways in python to parse xml is to use the lxml package that can be located at:
http://lxml.de/

It includes backwards compatibility with the python built-in module ElementTree and provides xPath support.

Here’s a tutorial to get you started:
http://lxml.de/tutorial.html