Question

Hi I have trouble understanding the minidom module for Python.

I have xml that looks like this:

<Show>
<name>Dexter</name>
<totalseasons>7</totalseasons>
<Episodelist>
<Season no="1">
<episode>
<epnum>1</epnum>
<seasonnum>01</seasonnum>
<prodnum>101</prodnum>
<airdate>2006-10-01</airdate>
<link>http://www.tvrage.com/Dexter/episodes/408409</link>
<title>Dexter</title>
</episode>
<episode>
<epnum>2</epnum>
<seasonnum>02</seasonnum>
<prodnum>102</prodnum>
<airdate>2006-10-08</airdate>
<link>http://www.tvrage.com/Dexter/episodes/408410</link>
<title>Crocodile</title>
</episode>
<episode>
<epnum>3</epnum>
<seasonnum>03</seasonnum>
<prodnum>103</prodnum>
<airdate>2006-10-15</airdate>
<link>http://www.tvrage.com/Dexter/episodes/408411</link>
<title>Popping Cherry</title>
</episode>

More pretty: http://services.tvrage.com/feeds/episode_list.php?sid=7926

And this is my python code trying to read from that:

xml = minidom.parse(urlopen("http://services.tvrage.com/feeds/episode_list.php?sid=7926"))
for episode in xml.getElementsByTagName('episode'):
    for node in episode.attributes['title']:
        print node.data

I can’t get the actual episode data out as I want to get all the data from each episode. I’ve tried different variants but I can’t get it to work. Mostly I get a <DOM Element: asdasd> back. I only care about the data inside each episode.

Thanks for the help

Answer 1

Each episode element has child-elements, including a title element. Your code, however, is looking for attributes instead.

To get text out of a minidom element, you need a helper function:

def getText(nodelist):
    rc = []
    for node in nodelist:
        if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
            rc.append(node.data)
    return ''.join(rc)

And then you can more easily print all the titles:

for episode in xml.getElementsByTagName('episode'):
    for title in episode.getElementsByTagName('title'):
        print getText(title)