Question

I have an xml file that looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE ROOT SYSTEM "zombie.dtd">
<ROOT>
    <row>
      <field name="buildid">26960</field>
      <field name="cast(status as char)">Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
C:cygwinin        285217976  88055920 197162056  31% /usr/bin
C:cygwinlib        285217976  88055920 197162056  31% /usr/lib
C:cygwin            285217976  88055920 197162056  31% /
c:                   285217976  88055920 197162056  31% /cygdrive/c
d:                   285217976  88055920 197162056  31% /cygdrive/d</field>
      <field name="eventtime">2011-05-25 16:26:09</field>
      <field name="schedulerid">13</field>
    </row>

and I am trying to parse out the individual fields (buildid, status, eventtime, etc) but I am getting none as the result of all of my function calls, here is what I am doing:

log("Parsing XML file...")
try:
    xml = ET.parse(xml_file)
except Exception, inst:
    print "Unexpected error opening %s: %s" % (file, inst)
    sys.exit(1)
log("Parsing Complete")

#store the root of the element tree
root = xml.getroot()

zombies = []
for zombie in root.findall('row/'):
    #read the zombie data
    buildID     = zombie.get('buildid')
    print buildID
    status      = zombie.get('cast(status as char')
    print status
    eventTime   = zombie.get('eventtime')
    print eventTime
    schedulerID = zombie.get('schedulerid')
    print schedulerID

    #create a zombie object
    #z = Zombie(buildID, status, eventTime, schedulerID)
    #zombies.append(z)

can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your zombie is a <row> element, not the <field> element that you want. When you call get() on it, you are trying to get an attribute on the <row> element, but what you want is the node value of the <field> element with that id.

If you have Python 2.7, you can use ElementTree’s partial XPath support to find the correct element:

build_id = zombie.find('field[name="buildid"]').text