Question

I want to sort some kind of functions by Python and XML, but I’m really confused about it.

I’ll give you an example,

There are 3 input options that contains in a config.xml file.

<inputs>
    <input1 value='1- Sending Email' />
    <input2 value='2- Extracting a Tar File' />
    <input3 value='3- Rebooting Server' />
</inputs>

—

So, I have already pythoned each function in a folder named “funcs” and I have no problems with them.

All I want is;

1- Listing the inputs and ask for which one to choose.

2- And I need to do it by array. Because I only want to update the XML file in the future, so I’ll never touch the main file that lets python to do every functions.

Any help will make me grateful, thank you.

Answer 1

This involves a bit of mindreading, but I think I know what you’re looking for… I built a file called inputs.xml that contains the xml you referenced above, then I read it and stored the inputs in a python dictionary called inputs

from xml.etree import ElementTree

inputs = dict()
tree = ElementTree.parse( 'inputs.xml' )
for row in tree.getiterator('inputs'):
    for elem in row.getchildren():
        inputs[elem.tag] = elem.get('value')

The results…

$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Jun 12 2010, 17:07:01) 
[GCC 4.3.4 20090804 (release) 1] on cygwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> 
>>> inputs = dict()
>>> tree = ElementTree.parse( 'inputs.xml' )
>>> for row in tree.getiterator('inputs'):
...     for elem in row.getchildren():
...         inputs[elem.tag] = elem.get('value')
... 
>>> print inputs
{'input2': '2- Extracting a Tar File', 'input3': '3- Rebooting Server', 'input1': '1- Sending Email'}
>>>

Now suppose you take input from a user and store it as a string in a python variable called input… if you want to access what choice the user selected, use inputs["input"+input]…