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Maybe a silly question, but I usually learn a lot with those. 🙂
I’m working on a software that deals a lot with XML, both as input and as output, and in between a lot of processing occurs.
My first thought was to use internally a dict as a internal data structure, and from there, work my way with a process of reading and writing it.
What you guys think? Any better approach, python-wise?
An XML document in general is a tree with lots of bells and whistles (attributes vs. child nodes, mixing of text with child nodes, entities, xml declarations, comments, and many more). Handling that should be left to existing, mature libraries – for Python, it’s commonly agreed that lxml is the most convenient choice, followed by the stdlib ElementTree modules (by which one lxml module,
lxml.etree, is so heavily inspired that incompabilities are exceptions).These handle all that complexity and expose it in somewhat handable ways with many convenience methods (lxml’s XPath support has saved me lot of code). After parsing, programs can – of course – go on to convert the trees into simpler data structures that fit the data actually modeled much better. What data structures exactly are possible and sensible depending on what you want to represent (if you misuse XML as a flat key-value storage, for instance, you could indeed go on to convert the tree into a dictionary).