How to iterate through child element using child element

Question

I need to enter the elements of a XML file in a default dictionary. Using first child element as my key, and the other 2 values will be in the list.

I've tried to keep the elements on separate list and then make them pairs, but still no success.

Below is the XML structure

<lines>
    <line>
        <lineName>'Line 1'</lineName>
        <lineCode>'5501'</lineCode>
        <machineName>'Line_1'</machineName>
    </line>
    <line>
        <lineName>'Line 2'</lineName>
        <lineCode>'5502'</lineCode>
        <machineName>'Line_2'</machineName>
    </line>
</lines>

Here's how I'm retrieving elements

item = myxmlcfg.getElementsByTagName('lineName')

item is a list with 2 elements

item['Line 1', 'Line 2']

same will hapen with lineCode and machineName elements

So I need a default dictionary with the output as this

lines {'Line 1': ['5501', 'Line_1'], 'Line 2':['5502', 'Line_2']}

where Key is lineName tag, and value is a list with 2 elements whose values are lineCode and machineName.

Can you suggest me a way to iterate on the xml elements to get an output as above? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

I don't have any experience with minidom, but with ElementTree it's a trivial task:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
from xml.etree.ElementTree import ElementTree

if __name__ == '__main__':

    xml_raw = '''
    <lines>
        <line>
            <lineName>'Line 1'</lineName>
            <lineCode>'5501'</lineCode>
            <machineName>'Line_1'</machineName>
        </line>
        <line>
            <lineName>'Line 2'</lineName>
            <lineCode>'5502'</lineCode>
            <machineName>'Line_2'</machineName>
        </line>
    </lines>
    '''

    root: ElementTree = ET.fromstring(xml_raw)
    lines = {}
    for line in root.findall('line'):
        name = line.findtext('lineName').strip("'")
        code = line.findtext('lineCode').strip("'")
        machine = line.findtext('machineName').strip("'")
        lines[name] = [code, machine]
    print(lines)

output:

{'Line 1': ['5501', 'Line_1'], 'Line 2': ['5502', 'Line_2']}