A simple xml.dom.minidom question

[Paulo Pinto]

Hi All,

I want to have some control of how the xml in writexml() is
written.

Is that possible? Or do I have to do navigate the XML tree by
myself?

Thanks in advance,
Paulo Pinto

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=]

I want to have some control of how the xml in writexml() is
written.

Depending on precisely what kind of control you want to have:
yes, that is possible.

Is that possible? Or do I have to do navigate the XML tree by
myself?

That may also be the case.

Regards,
Martin

 

[Paulo Pinto]

There are a set of applications that use XML files
as their configuration mechanism. Inside these files
there is some data that isn't standard XML but it in
form expected by the tools.

For example

<values>
"value1" "value2"
</values>

Now, if I use writexml(), I get the following,

<values>
&quot;value1&quot; &quot;value2&quot;
</values>

Which I understand, because it is how it should be
in standard XML.

However I am really required to use the first form.

So I guess that the only way with xml.dom.minidom is
to write my own code to tranverse the XML tree. Right?

 

[Peter Otten]

There are a set of applications that use XML files
as their configuration mechanism. Inside these files
there is some data that isn't standard XML but it in
form expected by the tools.

For example

<values>
"value1" "value2"
</values>

Now, if I use writexml(), I get the following,

<values>
&quot;value1&quot; &quot;value2&quot;
</values>

Which I understand, because it is how it should be
in standard XML.

However I am really required to use the first form.

Maybe you can get away with a tiny hack:

import xml.dom.minidom as md
import cStringIO

def wd(writer, data):
data = data.replace("&", "&amp;").replace("<", "&lt;")
writer.write(data)

md._write_data = wd

d = md.parseString("""<values>"v1" "v2"</values>""")
s = cStringIO.StringIO()
d.writexml(s)
print s.getvalue()

Peter

 

[Paulo Pinto]

Thanks, that is what I ended up doing.

However it doesn't sound very clean, anyway it works
now.

Thanks everyone for your help
Paulo

 

[Uche Ogbuji]

There are a set of applications that use XML files
as their configuration mechanism. Inside these files
there is some data that isn't standard XML but it in
form expected by the tools.

For example

<values>
"value1" "value2"
</values>

Now, if I use writexml(), I get the following,

<values>
&quot;value1&quot; &quot;value2&quot;
</values>

Which I understand, because it is how it should be
in standard XML.

However I am really required to use the first form.

So I guess that the only way with xml.dom.minidom is
to write my own code to tranverse the XML tree. Right?

FWIW, you can do this if you use the 4XSLT Python API to generate XML
as discussed in:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/15/py-xml.html

For one thing, this API does not escape quotes in content. And if you
need to preserve other characters from escaping you can do so by
telling the output handler to always output values as a CDATA section,
which would yield

<values><![CDATA[
"value1" "value2"
]]></values>

The Python would be along the lines of

import sys
from Ft.Xml.Xslt.XmlWriter import XmlWriter
from Ft.Xml.Xslt.OutputParameters import OutputParameters

oparams = OutputParameters()
oparams.cdataSectionElements = [u'values']
writer = XmlWriter(oparams, sys.stdout)
writer.startDocument()
writer.startElement(u'values')
writer.text(u'"value1" "value2"')
writer.endElement(u'values')
writer.endDocument()

--Uche
http://uche.ogbuji.net