xpathvsxmltodict
xpath is a library for Go that allows you to use XPath expressions to select elements from an HTML document. It is built on top of the html package in the Go standard library, and provides a way to select elements from an HTML document using XPath expressions, which are more powerful and expressive than CSS selectors.
xmltodict is a Python library that allows you to work with XML data as if it were JSON. It allows you to parse XML documents and convert them to dictionaries, which can then be easily manipulated using standard dictionary operations.
You can also use the library to convert a dictionary back into an XML document. xmltodict is built on top of the popular lxml library and provides a simple, intuitive API for working with XML data.
Note that despite using lxml conversion speeds can be quite slow for large XML documents and in web scraping this should be used to parse specific snippets instead of whole HTML documents.
xmltodict pairs well with JSON parsing tools like jmespath or jsonpath. Alternatively, it can be used in reverse mode to parse JSON documents using HTML parsing tools like CSS selectors and XPath.
It can be installed via pip by running pip install xmltodict command.
Example Use
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/antchfx/xpath"
"golang.org/x/net/html"
"strings"
)
func main() {
// Create an HTML string
html := `<html>
<body>
<div id="content">
<p>Hello, World!</p>
<a href="http://example.com">Example</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>`
// Parse the HTML string into a node tree
doc, err := html.Parse(strings.NewReader(html))
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
// Compile the XPath expression
expr, err := xpath.Compile("//p")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
// Use the Evaluate method to select elements from the document
nodes, err := expr.Evaluate(xpath.NodeNavigator(doc))
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
if nodes.MoveNext() {
fmt.Println(nodes.Current().Value())
// > Hello, World!
}
}
import xmltodict
xml_string = """
<book>
<title>The Great Gatsby</title>
<author>F. Scott Fitzgerald</author>
<publisher>Charles Scribner's Sons</publisher>
<publication_date>1925</publication_date>
</book>
"""
book_dict = xmltodict.parse(xml_string)
print(book_dict)
{'book': {'title': 'The Great Gatsby',
'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald',
'publisher': "Charles Scribner's Sons",
'publication_date': '1925'}}
# and to reverse:
book_xml = xmltodict.unparse(book_dict)
print(book_xml)
# the xml can be loaded and parsed using parsel or beautifulsoup:
from parsel import Selector
sel = Selector(book_xml)
print(sel.css('publication_date::text').get())
'1925'