Question

I am parsing an XML file with the minidom parser, where I’m iterating over the XML and output specific information that stands between the tags into a dictionary.

Like this:

d={}
dom = parseString(data)
macro=dom.getElementsByTagName('macro')
for node in macro:
    d={}
    id_name=node.getElementsByTagName('id')[0].toxml()
    id_data=id_name.replace('<id>','').replace('</id>','')
    print (id_data)
    cl_name=node.getElementsByTagName('cl')[1].toxml()
    cl_data=cl_name.replace('<cl>','').replace('</cl>','')
    print (cl_data)
    d_source[id_data]=(cl_data)

Now, my problem is that the data where I’m looking for in cl_name=node.getElementsByTagName(‘cl’)[1].toxml() is sometimes non-existent!

In this case the part of the XML looks like this:

<cl>blabla</cl>
<cl></cl>

Because of this I receive an “index is out of range”-error.
However, I really need this “nothing” in my dictionary. My dictionary should look like this:

d={blabla:'',xyz:'abc'}

I have to look for the empty text node, which I tried by doing this:

if node.getElementsByTagName('cl')[1].toxml is None:
    print ('')
else:
    cl_name=node.getElementsByTagName('cl')[1].toxml()
    cl_data=cl_name.replace('<cl>','').replace('</cl>','')
    print (cl_data)
    d_target[id_data]=(cl_data)
    print(d_target)

I still receive that indexing error…I also thought about inserting a white space into the original source file, but am not sure if this would solve the issue. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If the minidom is not dictated somehow, I suggest to change your mind and use the standard xml.etree.ElementTree. It is much easier.