Question

I’m trying to parse an AndroidManifest xml file for some analysis. What’s the optimal way to parse this? So far this is what I’m doing

import string
test=string.printable
f=open('AndroidManifest.xml', 'r').read()
x=""
for n in f:
        if n in test:
                x+=n
print x

And the result is more or less:

d
74Rv
vzPVZVL :Pd>P l
versionCode
minSdkVersiontargetSdkVersionnameiconlabel versionName
configChangespriorityandroid*http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/androidpackagemanifestngjvnpslnp.iplhmk1.0uses-sdkuses-permission#android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE'android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATEandroid.permission.

That’s just a portion of it. As you can see, it’s pretty damn ugly. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT:

So I get this strange traceback when I use parse

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test2.py", line 4, in <module>
  dom = parse(f)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1914, in parse
  return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 928, in parse
  result = builder.parseFile(file)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 207, in parseFile
  parser.Parse(buffer, 0)
  xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, column 0

Answer 1

I would suggest parsing it using an XML parser rather than plain text.

Here’s some excellent documentation on minidom.