SimpleXMLElement

SimpleXMLElement is a class to work with XML in a object oriented easy and simple way. It's a resembles (was inspired) by the PHP SimpleXML extension (SimpleXMLElement).

It was implemented in python encapsulating xml.dom.minidom: see [source:simplexml.py]

The main difference is that no automatic type conversion is done (int, long, etc.). It justs returns xml elements (textual), so they must be converted explicitly.

Note: Version 1.01a changes: method names (following python_naming_convention: addChild -> add_child), __getitem__ behaviour (to access attributes) and added __call__ to enhance search (instead of __getitem__ that was limited, so replace element['tag'] by element('tag')). See bellow.

Usage

Create a SimpleXMLElement instance with the XML text string to parse
Navigate through the object:

XML Tags are converted to python attributes
Repetitive tags can be iterated
Call elements to search by name/ns: element('tagname',ns=namespaces_uri,...)
Use items notation to access to attributes: element['attribute'] = value

Modify tags with add_child, add_attribute, add_comment, etc.
Convert back to xml using as_xml()

Methods:

SimpleXMLElement Constructor parameters:

text: xml text to parse
namespace: main tag xml namespace to be used (if any)
prefix: namespace prefix (if used)
elements, document: used internally, represents the xml.minidom objects

SimpleXMLElement supports some methods for introspection and updates:

add_child(name,text=None,ns=True): Adding a child tag to a node. text is optional, ns enables the use of the namespace
add_comment(data): Add an xml comment to this child
add_attribute(name, value): Set an attribute value from a string
as_xml(pretty=False): Return the XML representation of the document
get_name(): Return the tag name of this node
attributes(): Return a dict of attributes for this tag
children(): Return xml children tags of this element
unmarshall(types): Convert to python values the current serialized xml element. types is a python structure {tag name: convertion function}, ie.: types={'p': {'a': int,'b': int}, 'c': [{'d':str}]}
marshall(name, value, add_child=True, add_comments=False, ns=False): Analize python value and add the serialized XML element using tag name. add_child controls the level where the tag must be added, ns enables the use of the namespace.

Also, SimpleXMLElement objects redefines the behavior for some python functions/statements:

repr: Return the XML representation of this tag
in: Search for a tag name in this element or child nodes
unicode: Returns the unicode text nodes of the current element
str: Returns the str text nodes of the current element
int: Returns the integer value of the current element
float: Returns the float value of the current element

Example

>>> from pysimplesoap.simplexml import SimpleXMLElement
>>> span = SimpleXMLElement('<span><a href="google.com">google</a><prueba><i>1</i><float>1.5</float></prueba></span>')
>>> str(span.a)
'google'
>>> int(span.prueba.i)
1
>>> float(span.prueba.float)
1.5
>>>
>>> span = SimpleXMLElement('<span><a href="google.com">google</a><a>yahoo</a><a>hotmail</a></span>')
>>> for a in span.a: print str(a)
...     
google
yahoo
hotmail
>>> span.add_child('a','altavista')
'altavista'
>>> span.as_xml()
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf8"?><span><a href="google.com">google</a><a>yahoo</a><a>hotmail</a><a>altavista</a></span>'

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