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I want to parse text from a xml file.Consider that I have a some lines in a file.xml

<s id="1792387-2">Castro Verde is situated in the Baixo Alentejo Subregion within a territory known locally as the Campo Branco (English: White Plains).</s>

How can I extract the following text from the above line:

Castro Verde is situated in the Baixo Alentejo Subregion within a territory known locally as the Campo Branco (English: White Plains).

And after making some changes with the text, I want to get return the change text with the same tag as like below.

<s id="1792387-2"> Changed Text </s>

Any suggestion please.Thanks!

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  • 2
    What exactly is your question? Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 15:20
  • Do you want to parse the text, the XML or both? Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 15:22

3 Answers 3

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5

LXML makes this particularly easy.

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> text = '''<s id="1792387-2">Castro Verde is situated in the Baixo Alentejo Subregion within a territory known locally as the Campo Branco (English: White Plains).</s>'''
>>> def edit(s):
...     return 'Changed Text'
... 
>>> t = etree.fromstring(text)
>>> t.text = edit(t.text)
>>> etree.tostring(t)
'<s id="1792387-2">Changed Text</s>'
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4 Comments

getting Traceback Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <fragment> builtins.ImportError: No module named lxml
@Blue Ice: LXML is not a Python built-in module, you have to install it separately. lxml.de
If you'd like to just use the standard library (python 2.5+) you can use the ElementTree module (see my answer).
But, I am working in server & for the momentum not possible to do it , since no administration access.Any other alternatives please!
4

There are a couple stdlib methods for parsing xml… But in general ElementTree is the simplest:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from StringIO import StringIO
doc = ElementTree.parse(StringIO("""<doc><s id="1792387-2">Castro…</s><s id="1792387-3">Other stuff</s></doc>"""))
for elem in doc.findall("s"):
    print "Text:", elem.text
    elem.text = "new text"
    print "New:", ElementTree.dump(elem)

And if your XML is coming from a file, you can use:

f = open("path/to/foo.xml")
doc = ElementTree.parse(f)
f.close()
… use `doc` …
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4 Comments

Could you please have a look the following Traceback Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <fragment> builtins.ImportError: No module named StringIO
What version of Python are you using? (python --version)
Hrm… Is it a custom or restricted installation? Because StringIO should exist. Anyway, you can try loading it from a file (as per the second portion of my answer).
Just to be sure: is it possible you have multiple versions of Python installed? In Python 3 it is changed to from StringIO import StringIO. I have two Pythons on my system (2.6 and 3.2) and get into such a situation from time to time.
1

Parsing XML using the dom package (part of Python) http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/xml.dom.minidom.html is my favorite:

import xml.dom.minidom
d = xml.dom.minidom.parseString("<s id=\"1792387-2\">Castro Verde is situated in the Baixo Alentejo Subregion within a territory known locally as the Campo Branco (English: White Plains).</s>")
oldText = d.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].data
d.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].data = "Changed text"
d.toxml()

But this does not help you parse the text, so I am not sure what you exactly want there.

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1 Comment

I want to extract the following text from the above line: Castro Verde is situated in the Baixo Alentejo Subregion within a territory known locally as the Campo Branco (English: White Plains).

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