Question

I need to load an XML file and convert the contents into an object-oriented Python structure. I want to take this:

<main>     <object1 attr='name'>content</object> </main> 

And turn it into something like this:

main main.object1 = 'content' main.object1.attr = 'name' 

The XML data will have a more complicated structure than that and I can’t hard code the element names. The attribute names need to be collected when parsing and used as the object properties.

How can I convert XML data into a Python object?

Answer 1

It’s worth looking at lxml.objectify.

xml = '''<main> <object1 attr='name'>content</object1> <object1 attr='foo'>contenbar</object1> <test>me</test> </main>'''  from lxml import objectify  main = objectify.fromstring(xml) main.object1[0]             # content main.object1[1]             # contenbar main.object1[0].get('attr') # name main.test                   # me 

Or the other way around to build xml structures:

item = objectify.Element('item') item.title = 'Best of python' item.price = 17.98 item.price.set('currency', 'EUR')  order = objectify.Element('order') order.append(item) order.item.quantity = 3 order.price = sum(item.price * item.quantity for item in order.item)  import lxml.etree print(lxml.etree.tostring(order, pretty_print=True)) 

Output:

<order>   <item>     <title>Best of python</title>     <price currency='EUR'>17.98</price>     <quantity>3</quantity>   </item>   <price>53.94</price> </order>