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pythonminidom

Is parsing XML really this ugly in python?

I have a very small XML file (22 lines) with 5 elements(?) and I only want one value out of it.

This is the only way I can get the value I have found without using regular expressions

from xml.dom.minidom import parse
float(parse(filePath).getElementsByTagName('InfoType')[0].getElementsByTagName('SpecificInfo')[0].firstChild.data)

I feel like I'm missing something. There has to be a more pythonic way to handle XML, right?

Solution

  • The ElementTree library is a lot more Pythonic than xml.dom.minidom. If I'm understanding your XML structure right, your code would look something like this using ElementTree:

    import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(filePath)
data = float(tree.find('InfoType/SpecificInfo')[0].text)

    That should be a lot cleaner than what you're currently doing.