Question

I’m using xml.dom.mindom in Python and have retrieved the book node in the below XML tree. I want to get a list of all children nodes. In this case, I would think there would only be one.

<Book>
    <Title>Why is this so hard</Title>
</Book

When I call:

nodeList = bookNode.childNodes
print "nodeList has " + str(nodeList.length) + " elements"
for node in nodeList:
    print "Found a " + node.nodeName + " node"

I get the following output:

nodeList has 3 elements
Found a #text node
Found a Book node
Found a #text node

What are these random #text nodes? How do I get the tagName and value for each of the legitimate nodes? I want to get a list of key->value pairs for each of the nodes under Book. I don’t want to use getElementsByName because I will not know all of the tagNames ahead of time.

Book -> "Why is this so hard"

Thanks-
Jonathan

Answer 1

The first text node is the whitespace between <Book> and <Title>. The second is the whitespace between </Title> and </Book>