untanglevsxmltodict
untangle is a simple library for parsing XML documents in Python. It allows you to access data in an XML file as if it were a Python object, making it easy to work with the data in your code.
To use untangle, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install untangle``.
Once it is installed, you can use theuntangle.parse()`` function to parse an XML file and create a Python object.
For example:
import untangle
obj = untangle.parse("example.xml")
print(obj.root.element.child)
You can also pass a file-like object or a string containing XML data to the untangle.parse() function. Once you have an untangle object, you can access elements in the XML document using dot notation.
You can also access the attributes of an element by using attrib property, eg. `obj.root.element['attrib_name']`` untangle also supports xpath-like syntax to access the elements, obj.root.xpath("path/to/element")
It also supports iteration over the elements using obj.root.element.children
for child in obj.root.element.children:
print(child)
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
import untangle
obj = untangle.parse("example.xml")
print(obj.root.element.child)
# access attributes:
print(obj.root.element['attrib_name'])
# use xpath:
element = obj.root.xpath("path/to/element")
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'