Question

This might be a newbie question 🙂 but it’s irritating me since I’m new to XML. I have the following xml file:

<assetsMain>
  <assetParent type='character' shortName='char'>
    <asset>
      pub
    </asset>
    <asset>
      car
    </asset>
  </assetParent>
  <assetParent type='par' shortName='pr'>
    <asset>
      camera
    </asset>
    <asset>
      rig
    </asset>
  </assetParent>
</assetsMain>

Is it possible to retrieve all <assetParent> nodes and all their attributes and children texts? For example to have the result as the following:

[ [['character','char'],['pub','car']]
  [['par','pr'],['camera','rig']]
]

By the way, I use DOM and Python 2.6

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

An answer using lxml.etree. Xpath would probably be reusable in another capable library:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> data = """<assetsMain>
... <assetParent type='character' shortName='char'>
... <asset>pub</asset>
... <asset>car</asset>
... </assetParent>
... <assetParent type='par' shortName='pr'>
... <asset>camera</asset>
... <asset>rig</asset>
... </assetParent>
... </assetsMain>
... """
>>> doc = etree.XML(data)
>>> for aP in doc.xpath('//assetParent'):
...   parent = aP.attrib['type']
...   for a in aP.xpath('./asset/text()'):
...     print parent, a.strip()
...
character pub
character car
par camera
par rig