Question

I am using Python to generate some XML files which are used by another device. I have a solution which works but I am trying to improve it. One of the things which the XML must contain is a schedule. Here is what the entry for Monday should look like in XML.

<Monday open="08:00" close="17:00" />

I have no problems generating this with ElementTree in Python but right now I am stuck having a line of code for each day. So a snippet of my Python code looks like this:

SubElement(schedule, 'Monday', open='08:00', close='17:00')
SubElement(schedule, 'Tuesday', open='08:00', close='17:00')
.
.
.
SubElement(schedule, 'Sunday', open='08:00', close='17:00')

The XML file will wind up having multiple schedules in it and typing all of that out seems needlessly repetitive. Instead of this I wanted to create a function which iterates over a list to build up the parameters to pass to SubElement. As part of that function I created this string to replace the times in my SubElement call.

"open=" + "\'08:00\'" + ", " + "close=" + "\'17:00\'"

If I print this out it looks identical to what I pass to SubElement when I type out the code the long way. However it clearly isn’t the same as I get the following error when I try to run the script.

File "C:\Python27\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 528, in SubElement
   attrib = attrib.copy()
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'copy'

I have looked at the SubElement code and it seems to be expecting a dictionary. However, when I type things out the long way I don’t appear to be supplying a dictionary as input then either so I can’t see why the function should accept that input but not the string which appears, to me, to be equivalent. Is there any way to do what I am trying to do or am I stuck with a lot of repetitive lines of code?

Answer 1

You should pass a dictionary of attributes instead of “string of attributes” to SubElement, something like:

SubElement(schedule, 'Sunday', {'open': '08:00', 'close': '17:00'})

or

times = {'open': '08:00', 'close': '17:00'}
SubElement(schedule, 'Sunday', times)