Question

This is the sample xml document :

<bookstore>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>300.00</price>
    </book>

    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling </author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>625.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

I want to extract the text without specifying the elements how can i do this , because i have 10 such documents. I want so because my problem is that user is entering some word which I don’t know , it has to be searched in all of the 10 xml documents in their respective text portions. For this to happen I should know where the text lies without knowing about the element. One more thing that all these documents are different.

Please Help!!

Answer 1

You could simply strip out any tags:

>>> import re
>>> txt = """<bookstore>
...     <book category="COOKING">
...         <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
...         <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
...         <year>2005</year>
...         <price>300.00</price>
...     </book>
...
...     <book category="CHILDREN">
...         <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
...         <author>J K. Rowling </author>
...         <year>2005</year>
...         <price>625.00</price>
...     </book>
... </bookstore>"""
>>> exp = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
>>> text_only = exp.sub('',txt).strip()
>>> text_only
'Everyday Italian\n        Giada De Laurentiis\n        2005\n        300.00\n
  \n\n    \n        Harry Potter\n        J K. Rowling \n        2005\n        6
25.00'

But if you just want to search files for some text in Linux, you can use grep:

burhan@sandbox:~$ grep "Harry Potter" file.xml
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>

If you want to search in a file, use the grep command above, or open the file and search for it in Python:

>>> import re
>>> exp = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
>>> with open('file.xml') as f:
...     lines = ''.join(line for line in f.readlines())
...     text_only = exp.sub('',lines).strip()
...
>>> if 'Harry Potter' in text_only:
...    print 'It exists'
... else:
...    print 'It does not'
...
It exists