Question

I Got following XML from Amazon Web-Service.

<aws:UrlInfoResponse>
    <aws:Response>
        <aws:OperationRequest>
            <aws:RequestId>8789797</aws:RequestId>
        </aws:OperationRequest>
        <aws:UrlInfoResult>
            <aws:Alexa>
                <aws:TrafficData>
                    <aws:DataUrl type="canonical">google.com/</aws:DataUrl>
                    <aws:Rank>1</aws:Rank>
                </aws:TrafficData>
            </aws:Alexa>
        </aws:UrlInfoResult>
        <aws:ResponseStatus>
            <aws:StatusCode>Success</aws:StatusCode>
        </aws:ResponseStatus>
    </aws:Response>
</aws:UrlInfoResponse>

When i try to extract the rank.

xmldoc = minidom.parse(response)
itemlist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('aws:Rank')[0]

xmlData=itemlist.replace('<aws:Rank>','').replace('</aws:Rank>','')
print xmlData

It give me error.

AttributeError: Element instance has no attribute 'replace'

Answer 1

The issue here is that you are trying to use replace on an XML element, which is not a list and isn’t a string, which would have the .replace().

Since you are picking out the element (which is an Element object) by using =getElementsByTagName('aws:Rank')[0], you only have one thing to work on.

the data that you want can be reached with:

itemlist.firstChild.data

or

itemlist.firstChild.nodeValue

(@root, you had this right, I don’t know why you got downvoted)

Now I had some trouble parsing that XML because the namespace wasnt bound, but that wasn’t a biggie.

what would likely be clearer is the snippet as such:

xmldoc = minidom.parse(response)
xmlElement = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('aws:Rank')[0]
xmlData = xmlElement.firstChild.nodeValue
print xmlData

But in all honesty, you will probably want to check out the info on the Element object in minidom:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.dom.html#dom-element-objects