Question

I’m trying to parse an XML document. The document has HTML like formatting embedded, for example

<p>This is a paragraph
 <em>with some <b>extra</b> formatting</em>
 scattered throughout.
</p>

So far I’ve used

import xml.etree.cElementTree as xmlTree

to handle the XML document, but I am not sure if this provides the functionality I look for. How would I go about handling the text nodes here?

Also, is there a way to find the closing tags in a document?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If your XML document fits in memory, you should use Beautiful Soup which will give you a much cleaner access to the document. You’ll be able to select a node and automatically interact with its children; every node will have a .next command, which will iterate through the text up to the next tag.

So:

>>> b = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulStoneSoup("<p>This is a paragraph <em>with some <b>extra</b> formatting</em> scattered throughout.</p>")

>>> b.find('p')
<p>This is a paragraph <em>with some <b>extra</b> formatting</em> scattered throughout.</p>

>>> b.find('p').next
u'This is a paragraph '

>>> b.find('p').next.next
<em>with some <b>extra</b> formatting</em>

That, or something like it, should solve your problem.

If it doesn’t fit in memory, you’ll need to subclass a SAX parser, which is a bit more work. To do that, you use from xml.parsers import expat and write handlers for opening and closing of tags. It’s a bit more involved.