Question

I have an external xml file that I am loading in my views.py file

def test(request):

    url = urllib2.urlopen("http://someurl.com?xml")
    dom = minidom.parse(url)

    groups = dom.getElementsByTagName("group")

    deal_holder = []

    #    Iterate over each DOM group element:
    for group in groups:
        # Iterate over each child node
        for groupChild in group.childNodes:
            deal_holder.append(groupChild)

    return render_to_response('folder/test.html', {'deal_holder':deal_holder})

This is what the loaded XML file looks like:

<page>
    <site>
        <siteid>25550</siteid>
        <sitename>
            <![CDATA[ Some Text Here ]]>
        </sitename>
        <sitelink>
            http://somelinkehere.com
        </sitelink>
        <timezone>
            <![CDATA[ Pacific Time ]]>
        </timezone>
    </site>
    <groups>
        <enablefeaturedgroup>OFF</enablefeaturedgroup>
        <group>
            <groupid>467246</groupid>
            <groupname>
                <![CDATA[ Today's Deal ]]>
            </groupname>
            <groupdescription>
                <![CDATA[ ]]>
            </groupdescription>
            </group>
            <group>
            <groupid>467247</groupid>
            <groupname>
                <![CDATA[ Past Deals ]]>
            </groupname>
            <groupdescription>
                <![CDATA[ ]]>
            </groupdescription>
        </group>
    </groups>
</page>

The problem is that all of the examples I’ve seen use something like what I’m using except that they usually have XML tags that look like this: <weather:forecast day="Wed" date="14 Sep 2011" low="56" high="72" text="AM Clouds/PM Sun" code="30"/> and are able to retrieve the information from stuff like the day="Wed", date="14 Sep 2011", low="56" etc… but the info I want to retrieve is actually between the tags such as <siteid>25550</siteid>

Any advice or info would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

With lxml you could do something like this:

import lxml.etree

tree = lxml.etree.parse("http://someurl.com")
sites = tree.xpath("//site")

for site in sites:
    siteid = site.find("siteid").text
    print siteid