Question

Environment: Python 2.6.5, Eclipse SDK 3.7.1, Pydev 2.3

I am trying to parse and change values in XML data in Python using xml.dom.minidom and I’m having an issue with blank text nodes.

When I parse an XML file into a DOM object and then convert it back to a string using toxml(), the closing “Description” tags get messed up after all the blank text nodes.

Does anyone know the problem is?

Contents of issue.py

from xml.dom import minidom  
xml_dom_object = minidom.parse('news_shows.xml')  
main_node = xml_dom_object.getElementsByTagName('NewsShows')[0]  
xml_string = main_node.toxml()  
print xml_string  

Contents of news_shows.xml (notice the two blank Text nodes):

<NewsShows Planet="Earth" Language="English" Year="2012">
<NewsShow ShowName="The_Young_Turks">
 <Description Detail="Best_show_of_all_time_according_to_many">True</Description>
 <Description Detail="The_only_source_of_truth"></Description>
 <Description Detail="Three_hours_of_truth_per_day">True</Description>
</NewsShow>
<NewsShow ShowName="The_Rachel_Maddow_Show">
<Description Detail="Pretty_great_as_well">True</Description>
<Description Detail="Sucks_badly">False</Description>
<Description Detail="Conveys_more_information_than_TYT"></Description>
</NewsShow>
</NewsShows>

Output of the script (notice the 2 “Description” tags that are messed up):

<NewsShows Language="English" Planet="Earth" Year="2012">
<NewsShow ShowName="The_Young_Turks">
 <Description Detail="Best_show_of_all_time_according_to_many">True</Description>
 <Description Detail="The_only_source_of_truth"/>
 <Description Detail="Three_hours_of_truth_per_day">True</Description>
</NewsShow>
<NewsShow ShowName="The_Rachel_Maddow_Show">
<Description Detail="Pretty_great_as_well">True</Description>
<Description Detail="Sucks_badly">False</Description>
<Description Detail="Conveys_more_information_than_TYT"/>
</NewsShow>

Answer 1

Is this actually causing a problem somewhere? From all that I know about xml, the strings <tag></tag> and <tag/> are equivalent.