Question

I am trying to read the xml file email.xml(Data below) using the python code provided below,am not able to print the actual data present in the xml file but getting the below output. Where am I going wrong?

CURRENT OUTPUT:

xmlfile
<open file 'email.xml', mode 'r' at 0x0226AF98>
[<DOM Element: to at 0x231d620>]
[<DOM Element: cc at 0x231d6c0>]
[<DOM Element: bcc at 0x231d760>]

PYTHON CODE:

import xml.dom.minidom as minidom

def getemaildata():
    # Open the XML file
    xmlfile = open('email.xml','r')
    print "xmlfile"
    print xmlfile
    dom = minidom.parse(xmlfile)
    email=dom.getElementsByTagName('email')
    for node in email:
        toemail=dom.getElementsByTagName('to')
        print toemail
        ccemail=dom.getElementsByTagName('cc')
        print ccemail
        bccemail=dom.getElementsByTagName('bcc')
        print bccemail
return (toemail,ccemail,bccemail)

def main ():
(To,CC,BCC)=getemaildata()

 if __name__ == '__main__':
main()

email.xml file:

<email>
    <to>[e-mail];[e-mail]; 
         [e-mail];[e-mail];</to> 
    <cc> data.team </cc>
    <bcc>[e-mail]</bcc>     
</email>

Answer 1

You are getting back lists of “Element” objects from the XML parser. You need to iterate further to get to the actual “Text” nodes.

Eg:

# this returns a list of all Elements that have the tag "to"
toemail=dom.getElementsByTagName('to')

# Here we take the first node returned with tag 'to', then it's first child node
textnode = toemail[0].childNodes[0]

# print the data in the textnode
print textnode.data

To clean the addresses from the text node:

for address in textnode.data.split(';'):
    if address == '':
        # Catch empty entries as a result of trailing ;
        continue
    email = i.strip().strip('\n')
    print email