DOM text to xml aarrgghhh!!!!

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth huntermorgan:
  [...]
> can anybody help???? below is the code and below that is a small
> snipet of the course outline

Excellent problem report!

I was only able to duplicate your problem if I munged the tab
characters in the text into spaces (which I did quite
accidentally).  Without tabs,

>     tagSequence = re.compile("(^\d+)\t+")

never matches, so of course the document is empty.

If tabs are present as the text of your note indicates, the result
on my machine is not what you report -- an XML document with just
a root node -- but an exception.  (A NameError, to be precise.)
If that's fixed, there's an exception for having too many root
elements in the XML document.  Since you don't report any of this,
I assume you're seeing a tab-munging problem or some such.

A quick and dirty way to start figuring out what's wrong: add

        s = line
        print 'processing line:', repr(s)      # this
        target = tagSequence.search(s)
        print 'target is', repr(target)        # and this

to the code and run it again.

(I'm a bit surprised, btw, that
    rootElement = newdocument.createElement("2003 Course Outline")
works, since that's not a legal element name in XML.  You'll have
trouble trying to parse this file.)

-- 
Steven Taschuk                             staschuk at telusplanet.net
"I may be wrong but I'm positive."  -- _Friday_, Robert A. Heinlein