Question

I’m basically trying to do this (pseudo code, not valid python):

limit = 10
results = [xml_to_dict(artist) for artist in xml.findall('artist') while limit--]

So how could I code this in a concise and efficient way?
The XML file can contain anything between 0 and 50 artists, and I can’t control how many to get at a time, and AFAIK, there’s no XPATH expression to say something like “get me up to 10 nodes”.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming that xml is an ElementTree object, the findall() method returns a list, so just slice that list:

limit = 10
limited_artists = xml.findall('artist')[:limit]
results = [xml_to_dict(artist) for artist in limited_artists]