Question

I extracted information from two XML files into 2 dictionaries because I wanted to compare these files and change information in one of them.

These are my dictionaries:

source dictionary:

d_source={'123': 'description_1', '456': 'description_2'}

target dictionary:

d_target={'123': '\n', '456': 'description_2'}

This is my replacement code:

for i in d_source:
    for j in d_target:
        if d_target[j]=='\n':
            d_target[j]=d_source[i]
print (d_target)

d_target is updated to

d_target = {'123': 'description_1', '456': 'description_2'}

However, my original files from which I extracted the dictionaries remain unchanged. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

One of the solutions for you would be:

Let’s say you want to print it as a json, it makes sense if you are already using dicts.

import json 
output = json.dumps(d_target)

f = open("myfile", 'w')
f.write(output)
f.close()

This will print your dict to file myfile as a json.

And if you want it as a xml you can use elementtree module.

Then you could use something like this:

from elementtree import ElementTree as ETree
ET = ETree
ET.xml_declaration = "true"
products = ET.Element("products")
properties = ET.Element("properties")
products.append(properties)
products.attrib["xmlns"] = "http://schema.example.com/product_data_1.0"
update = ET.Element("update")
delete = ET.Element("delete")
products.append(delete)
products.append(update)

This is just an example to see how it is done and this would create something like:

 <products xmlns="http://schema.example.com/product_data_1.0">
      <properties />
      <delete />
      <update />
 </products>

And to print this xml to file again:

output = ET.tostring(products, "utf-8")
f = open("xml", 'w')
f.write(output)
f.close()