Question

Possible Duplicate:
Parsing blank XML tags with LXML and Python

Given the following XML file:

<Car>
    <Color>Blue</Color>
    <Make>Chevy</Make>
    <Model/>
</Car>

and using the following code:

Car = element.xpath('//Root/Foo/Bar/Car/node()')
parsedCarData = [{field.tag: field.text for field in Car} for action in Car]

How can I replace key values of type None with a blank string so I can use parsed key values into a MySQL statement.

My Attempt – Thanks to Marcin
Using a turnary seemed to work

parsedCars = [{field.tag: field.text if isinstance(field.text,str) else '' for field in Cars} for action in Cars]

For my cases it has always evaluated as true.However when outputting a previous None type is outputs twice. Improvements are welcome!

Answer 1

Given your requirement, you might be better off filtering on is None, but in practice, I doubt this will make a difference:

parsedCars = [{field.tag: field.text if field.text is not None else '' for field in Cars} for action in Cars]

You should probably use basestr instead of str, though, because your code will replace all instances of unicode with '', should lxml ever switch to unicode.