Extracting xml from html

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On Sep 19, 3:13 am, Stefan Behnel <stefan.behnel-n05... at web.de> wrote:
> kyoso... at gmail.com wrote:
> > Does this make sense? It works pretty well, but I don't really
> > understand everything that I'm doing.
>
> > def Parser(filename):
>
> It's uncommon to give a function a capitalised name, unless it's a factory
> function (which this isn't).
>

Yeah. I was going to use a class (and I still might), so that's how it
got capitalized.


> >     events = ("recordnum", "primaryowner", "customeraddress")
>
> You're not using this anywhere below, so I assume this is left-over code.
>

I realized I didn't need that line soon after I posted. Sorry about
that!


> You could do this more easily in a couple of ways. One is to use XPath:
>
>    print [el.text for el in tree.xpath("//primaryowner|//customeraddress")]
>

This works quite well. Wish I'd thought of it.

> Note that this works directly on the tree that you retrieved right in the
> third line of your code.
>
> Another (and likely simpler) solution is to first find the "Row" element and
> then start from that:
>
>    row = tree.find("//Row")
>    print row.findtext("primaryowner")
>    print row.findtext("customeraddress")
>

I tried this your way and Laurent's way and both give me this error:

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'findtext'


> See the lxml tutorial on this, as well as the documentation on XPath support
> and tree iteration:
>
> http://codespeak.net/lxml/xpathxslt.html#xpathhttp://codespeak.net/lxml/api.html#iteration
>
> Hope this helps,
> Stefan

I'm not sure what George's deal is. I'm not a beginner with Python,
just with lxml. I don't have all the hundreds of modules of Python
memorized and I have yet to meet any one who does. Even if I had used
Beautiful Soup, my code would probably still suck and I was told
explicitly by my boss to avoid adding new dependencies to my programs
whenever possible.

Thanks for the help. I'll add the list comprehension to my code.

Mike