XML help needed

[Duncan Smith]

"Martin von Loewis" <loewis at informatik.hu-berlin.de> wrote in message
news:j4d725n9ua.fsf at informatik.hu-berlin.de...
> "Duncan Smith" <buzzard at urubu.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
>
> > Thanks for the reply.  Basically I have an XML file containing data
> > that I need as various Python objects (strings, lists, arrays etc.).
> > I don't need to make changes to XML files, although I might want to
> > write data to new XML files of the same type (same DTD).
>
> I see. In that case, I recommend to use plain print statements to
> generate the XML (or other means of string processing, like collecting
> pieces of the document in a list). This is easier than generating a
> DOM or SAX in-memory representation, and then serializing it.
>
> > (I don't really want to have to learn about XSL, XSLT, X-path, SAX,
> > DOM, Pyxie etc. unless I know it's going to be useful.)
>
> Depending on the exact processing job, XSLT may be indeed useful. If
> you know that the output only depends on the input, then writing a
> style sheet that does the transformation, without writing a line of
> Python, might be possible.
>
> > Learning all that lot would be a lot of effort to achieve what I
> > need.  So if you (or anyone) could give me advice along the lines of
> > "DOM would be appropriate but you'll have to know... as well", then
> > I'd be grateful.
>
> DOM alone will allow you to get all information from the document, in
> a moderatly convenient way. If you find to that you write algorithms
> of the kind
>
> Starting from the root, go to the first child element "foo", then to
> the last child element "bar", and take its "foobar" attribute value
>
> than XPath would help to tighten your code.
>
> > Martin, you were bang on with the 'invalid XML' thing.  Cheers.
>
> That's a phrase (to be bang on) that is beyond my English
> understanding. I take it to mean something good, in absence of a clear
> understanding :-)
>

Spot on, exactly right.  My application's based on graphical models, so DOM
kind of appeals to me.  Thanks for your reply, and thanks to Paul for his.

Duncan

> Regards,
> Martin