Question

I am trying to create an XML string from the values in a dictionary with the following structure. The number of keys (dictionary depth) from the root to the strings is indeterminate, ranging from 1 to ?.

'modes': {   'P': {   'S': {  u'01': u'Some Text A.',
                              u'02': u'Some Text B.',
                              u'03': u'Some Text C.',
                              u'04': u'Some Text D.',
                              u'05': u'Some Text E.',
                              u'06': u'Some Text F.'},
                     'U': {   u'01': u'Some Text G.',
                              u'02': u'Some Text H.'}},
            'R': {   'S': {   u'01': u'Some Text I.',
                              u'02': u'Some Text J.',
                              u'03': u'Some Text K.',
                              u'04': u'Some Text M.',
                              u'05': u'LSome Text N.'},
                     'U': {   u'01': u'Some Text O.',
                              u'02': u'Some Text P.',
                              u'03': u'Some Text Q.'}}}

An example of the output I’m after would be:

<modes>
  <property P>
    <property S>
      <text>
        <order>'01'</order>
        <string>'Some Text A.'</string>
      </text>
      <text>
        <order>'02'</order>
        <string>'Some Text B.'</string>
      </text>
      ...
    </property S>

    <property U>
      <text>
        <order>'01'</order>
        <string>'Some Text G.'</string>
      </text>
      <text>
        <order>'02'</order>
        <string>'Some Text H.'</string>
      </text>    
    </property U>
  </property P>

  <property R>
      <property S>
      <text>
        <order>'01'</order>
        <string>'Some Text I.'</string>
      </text>
      <text>
        <order>'02'</order>
        <string>'Some Text J.'</string>
      </text>
      ...
    </property S>

    <property U>
      <text>
        <order>'01'</order>
        <string>'Some Text O.'</string>
      </text>
      <text>
        <order>'02'</order>
        <string>'Some Text P.'</string>
      </text>    
      ...
    </property U>
  </property R>
</modes>

I’m more interested in how to iterate the structure such that I can put the children in the right parents, rather than the exact output as XML. Any advise about maybe altering the structure of the data would also be appreciated, as I feel like I have painted myself into a corner!
Thanks Julian

Answer 1

They way I found was to use a recursive function that would print key,value if dictionary[key] was not a dict, and otherwise print the recursive call

def _dict_to_xml(dictionary):
    returnlist = []
    for key in dictionary:
        if isinstance(dictionary[key],dict):
            returnlist.append(r'<node name="{name}">'.format(name=key))
            returnlist.append(_dict_to_xml(dictionary[key]))
            returnlist.append(r'</node>')
        else:
            returnlist.append(r'<order>{key}</order>'.format(key=key))
            returnlist.append(r'<string>{value}</string>'.format(value = dictionary[key]))
    return '\n'.join(returnlist)


def dict_to_xml(dictionary):
    return '<?xml version="1.0"?>\n'+_dict_to_xml(dictionary)+'</xml>'