Question

I have a basic grasp of XML and python and have been using minidom with some success. I have run into a situation where I am unable to get the values I want from an XML file. Here is the basic structure of the pre-existing file.

<localization>
    <b n="Stats">
        <l k="SomeStat1">
            <v>10</v>
        </l>
        <l k="SomeStat2">
            <v>6</v>
        </l>
    </b>
    <b n="Levels">
        <l k="Level1">
            <v>Beginner Level</v>
        </l>
        <l k="Level2">
            <v>Intermediate Level</v>
        </l>
    </b>
</localization>

There are about 15 different <b> tags with dozens of children. What I’d like to do is, if given a level number(1), is find the <v> node for the corresponding level. I just have no idea how to go about this.

Answer 1

If you really only care about searching for an <l> tag with a specific “k” attribute and then getting its <v> tag (that’s how I understood your question), you could do it with DOM:

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString

xmlDoc = parseString("""<document goes here>""")
lNodesWithLevel2 = [lNode for lNode in xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("l")
                    if lNode.getAttribute("k") == "Level2"]

matchingVNodes = map(lambda lNode: lNode.getElementsByTagName("v"), lNodesWithLevel2)

print map(lambda vNode: vNode.firstChild.nodeValue, matchingVNodes)
# Prints [u'Intermediate Level']

How that is what you meant.