Question

We have a Java project which uses JSF. In our view layer we didn’t use ids in all our XHTML files. What I want to do is to parse XHTML files and check for tags like

<h:inputText id="username" value="#{identity.username}"/>

The constant part is <h:input...>
The rest can be anything like <h:inputSecret <h:inputWHATELSE after selecting the correct tag. I want to check if there is an id attribute of that tag. If not, I want to add an id to it.

Here is one of our XHTML files.

I tried to do the work with Python. I tried ElementTree, piksemel and BeautifulSoup. Any help about this issue will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Using Beautifulsoup, you could do this as follows:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re

soup = BeautifulSoup(<your_xml_here>)
nodes = soup.findAll(name=re.compile('^h:input'))
for node in nodes:
    if 'id' not in dict(node.attrs):
        node['id'] = <whatever you need>

As it can be seen, to get all the nodes that match the name pattern you’re looking for all you need is a regular expression. After that, you can check the node attributes to make sure if id is defined or not and assign a new value when needed.