xml.dom.minidom childnodes

[Vincent De Baere]

Hi

I am playing around a little with python (I've started using python at 1 
PM today, so I guess I could be considered a newbie :-)), and have come 
across a little problem regarding xml.dom.minidom.

this code snippet:

menudoc = xml.dom.minidom.parse("menu.xml")
menurootchildren = menudoc.documentElement.childNodes
menunode = menurootchildren[1].cloneNode(1)
sys.stdout.write(menunode.toprettyxml(" "))

acts on this file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<menu>
  <ol>
   <li>test</li>
   <li>test2</li>
   <li><ol><li>test3</li></ol></li>
  </ol>
  <ol>
   <li>please don't display this</li>
  </ol>
</menu>

The thing I got from the manual is that lists (such as menurootchildren) 
are zerobased.

As you can see in the xml file, there is a newline after the (root) 
documentelement. I guess that's why I need to use menurootchildren[1] 
instead of menurootchildren[0] to access the first child.

I was wondering how I could get the child elements (without the text 
nodes) instead of the childnodes, thus simply accessing the first child 
(first occurance of ol) element by using menurootchildren[0]. That's 
because I would very much like the script to come up with the same 
result regardless of if there is a newline after the root element or not...

TIA

Vincent