Question

I have a not-so-well formed XML with hyphens inside the tag names, which I want to replace with underscores (to be able to work with lxml.objectify). I want to replace ALL tag names, including nested childs.

A sample XML:

<job>
  <server>
    <cpu-set>
    </cpu-set>
  </server>
  <ip-routings>
  </ip-routings>
</job>

I want to convert this XML in a clean way (without regexes but with an XML lib like lxml) to this one:

<job>
  <server>
    <cpu_set>
    </cpu_set>
  </server>
  <ip_routings>
  </ip_routings>
</job>

What would be a pythonic and clean way to do that?

Answer 1

Use xpath to find the elements with hyphens and re-write tags:

from lxml import etree
data = """<job>
  <server>
    <cpu-set>
    </cpu-set>
  </server>
  <ip-routings>
  </ip-routings>
</job>"""
doc = etree.XML(data)
for e in doc.xpath('//*[contains(local-name(),"-")]'):
  e.tag = e.tag.replace('-','_')

print etree.tostring(doc)

Yields:

<job>
  <server>
    <cpu_set>
    </cpu_set>
  </server>
  <ip_routings>
  </ip_routings>
</job>