Question

I am currently finishing up on a program that is suppose to parse a xml file and then set it up and then email it. I am almost done with it but I appear to be stuck and could use some assistance. I am trying to get the path attribute “dir” and “file” from the completed dictionary but i am getting a error with it. Here is part of the code that I am currently working on.

Update: I added the dictonary telling me if it its a Directory change or a Filename change a list along side the

def formatChangesByAuthor(changesByAuthor): 
    content = ''
    for author, changes in sorted(changesByAuthor.iteritems()):
    authorName = get_author_name( author );
    content += '       ***** Changes By '+authorName+'*****\n\n'
    for change in changes:
        rawDate = change['date']
        dateRepresentation = rawDate.strftime("%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p")
        content += '           Date: '+ dateRepresentation+'\n\n'

        path_change = change['paths']
        path_attribute= change['Attribute_changes']

        finalizedPathInformation = []

        for single_change in path_change:
            for single_output in path_attribute:  
                finalizedPathInformation.append(single_output+single_change)

        content +="           " + str(finalizedPathInformation) + "\n"

What I am hoping to get to work is when there are multiple path in paths it will do

filename : test.xml

directory location : /Testforlder/

for some reason it is showing me a memory error. I wonder if i could of wrote the path part better. Here is my error I am getting.

    content +="           " + str(finalizedPathInformation) + "\n" MemoryError

Now here is part of the xml file if it will help.

<log>
<logentry
revision="33185">
<author>glv</author>
<date>2012-08-06T21:01:52.494219Z</date>
<paths>
<path
action="M"
kind="file">/trunk/build.xml</path>
<path
 kind="dir"
 action="M">/trunk</path>
 </paths>
 <msg>PATCH_BRANCH:N/A
 BUG_NUMBER:N/A
 FEATURE_AFFECTED:N/A
 OVERVIEW:N/A 
 Testing the system log.
 </msg>
 </log>

Now i had the nodeValue saved in the dictionary but for some reason I can’t to get the attribute within the nodeValue to see if it has a “dir” or a “file” attribute at all. I am pretty sure I am doing something wrong somewhere. Any advice or help would be very appreciated and welcomed 🙂

Answer 1

Obviously your path_change is a list. Try path_change[0].getAttribute('kind').

I also propose to add debug output (print path_change before the call of getAttribute()) to find out more about your data structures.

Of course if there’s a list you might want to process all elements in the list, not just the first. One way to do this could be:

...
    for single_change in path_change:
        kind = str(single_change.getAttribute("kind"))
        if kind == 'dir':
            content += '            Directory Location: '
        elif kind == 'file':
            content += '            Filename:  '
        else:
            raise SomeException("kind is neither dir nor file", kind, single_change)
        content += (str(single_change).
                    replace("u'","       \n").
                    replace("[","").
                    replace("',","").
                    replace("']", "\n ") + "\n")
...