Newbie needs help extracting data from XML

[Paul McGuire]

"Rodney" <rodney_garland at hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:qs2dndtmv51Rui7eRVn-uw at comcast.com...
> Hi,
>
> Im a Python newbie and am trying to get the data out of a series of XML
> files.  So for example the xml is:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><soap:Envelope
> xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
> xmlns:soapenc="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
> xmlns:tns="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.wsdl"
> xmlns:types="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.wsdl"
> xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
> xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><soap:Header><wsu:Timestamp
>
xmlns:wsu="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2002/07/utility"><wsu:Created>2005-
12-28T05:59:38Z</wsu:Created><wsu:Expires>2005-12-28T06:04:38Z</wsu:Expires>
</wsu:Timestamp></soap:Header><soap:Body
>
soap:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><q1:NodePingR
esponse
> xmlns:q1="http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.xsd"><return
>
xsi:type="xsd:string">Ready</return></q1:NodePingResponse></soap:Body></soap
:Envelope>
>
>
> and I want to get the value from the element "return" which currently has
a
> value of "Ready".
>
> Other XML files I want to work with may have several elements I want to
pull
> data from.  This seem relatively easy but I have been reading and cruising
> google for hours and none of the examples make any sense.
>
> I appreciate any code writing help with this.
>
>
This is data in a set of files?  It looks like the SOAP reply from a Web
Service described in the WSDL found at
http://www.ExchangeNetwork.net/schema/v1.0/node.wsdl, specifically the
NodePingResponse which is the return value from the web operation NodePing.
You might best generate the proper Python parsing classes using SOAPpy,
using the WSDL source.

You can also use Python's XML modules for loading the XML into a DOM tree,
or use Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree utility module.

-- Paul