xml data or other?

[Artie Ziff]

On 11/9/12 5:50 AM, rusi wrote:
> On Nov 9, 5:54 pm, Artie Ziff <artie.z... at gmail.com> wrote:
> # submit correctedinput to etree 
I was very grateful to get the "leg up" on getting started down that 
right path with my coding. Many thanks to you, rusi. I took your 
excellent advices and have this working.

class Converter():
     PREFIX = """<?xml version="1.0"?>
     <data>
     """
     POSTFIX = "</data>"
     def __init__(self, data):
         self.data = data
         self.writeXML()
     def writeXML(self):
         pattern = re.compile('<testname=(.*)>')
         replaceStr = r'<testname name="\1">'
         xmlData = re.sub(pattern, replaceStr, self.data)
         self.dataXML = self.PREFIX + xmlData.replace("\\", "/") + 
self.POSTFIX

###  main
# input to script is directory:
# sanitize trailing slash
testPkgDir = sys.argv[1].rstrip('/')
# Within each test package directory is doc/testcase
tcDocDir = "doc/testcases"
# set input dir, containing broken files
tcTxtDir = os.path.join(testPkgDir, tcDocDir)
# set output dir, to write proper XML files
tcXmlDir = os.path.join(testPkgDir, tcDocDir + "_XML")
if not os.path.exists(tcXmlDir):
     os.makedirs(tcXmlDir)
# iterate through files in input dir
for filename in os.listdir(tcTxtDir):
     # set filepaths
     filepathTXT = os.path.join(tcTxtDir, filename)
     base = os.path.splitext(filename)[0]
     fileXML = base + ".xml"
     filepathXML = os.path.join(tcXmlDir, fileXML)
     # read broken file, convert to proper XML
     with open(filepathTXT) as f:
         c = Converter(f.read())
         xmlFO = open(filepathXML, 'w')   # xmlFileObject
         xmlFO.write(c.dataXML)
         xmlFO.close()

###

Writing XML files so to see whats happening. My plan is to
keep xml data in memory and parse with xml.etree.ElementTree.

Unfortunately, xml parsing fails due to angle brackets inside
description tags. In particular, xml.etree.ElementTree.parse()
aborts on '<' inside xml data such as the following:

<testname name="cron_test.sh">
     <description>
         This testcase tests if crontab <filename> installs the cronjob
         and cron schedules the job correctly.
     <\description>

##

What is right way to handle the extra angle brackets?
Substitute on line-by-line basis, if that works?
Or learn to write a simple stack-style parser, or
recursive descent, it may be called?

I am open to comments to improve my code more to be more readable,
pythonic, or better.

Many thanks
AZ