Question

I exported a mysql database to xml with phpmyadmin and now I would like to parse it with minidom but I’m having trouble getting the content in the form that I need it.

Summary: I need to assign the variable title to the text contained within <column name="news_title">This is the title</column>

The extracted db looks like this:

<pma_xml_export version="1.0" >
    <database name="dbname">
        <!-- Table newsbox -->
        <table name="newsbox">
            <column name="news_id">1</column>
            <column name="news_title">This is the title</column>
            <column name="news_text">This is the news text</column>
            <column name="date">Thu, 28 Feb 2008 20:10:30 -0500</column>
            <column name="author">author</column>
            <column name="category">site_announcement</column>
        </table>
    </database>
</pma_xml_export>

I am able to extract the text with the following script but it’s not in the form that I need:

doc = parseString(document)

pmaexport = doc.getElementsByTagName("pma_xml_export")[0]
columns = pmaexport.getElementsByTagName("column")


for item in columns:
    name = item.getAttribute("name")
    text = item.firstChild.data.strip()
    print name, text

What I need is something where I can assign the text contents of these elements to variables which can be passed on e.g.,

for item in columns:
    title = ???
    text = ???
    date = ???
    author = ???

If the db output was in the form of <title>Here's the Title</title> I would have plenty of examples to go off, but I just can’t find any reference to something like <column name="news_title">This is the title</column>

Answer 1

It’s been a while since I’ve used xml.dom.minidom but this should work…

columns = [c.firstChild.data for c in pmaexport.getElementsByTagName('column') if c.getAttribute('name') == 'news_title']

Plus, like, list comprehension!