parsing nested unbounded XML fields with ElementTree

Question

I have an XML file that has an element called "Node". These can be nested to any depth and the depth of the nesting is not known to me. I need to parse the file and preserve the nesting. For exmaple, if the XML file had:

<Node Name="A">
   <Node Name="B">
      <Node Name="C">
        <Node Name="D">
          <Node Name="E">

When I'm parsing Node "E" I need to know I'm in A/B/C/D/E. Problem is I don't know how deep this can be. This is the code I have so far:

nodes = []

def parseChild(c):
    if c.tag == 'Node':
        if 'Name' in c.attrib: 
            nodes.append(c.attrib['Name'])
        for c1 in c:
            parseChild(c1)
    else:
        for node in nodes:
            print node,
        print c.tag

for parent in tree.getiterator():
    for child in parent:
        for x in child:
            parseChild(x)

My problem is that I don't know when I'm done with a node and I should remove a level of nesting. I would think this is a fairly common situation, but I could not find any examples of parsing a file like this. Perhaps I'm going about it completely wrong.

Larry Martell · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-27 18:05:45Z

1

With some help from the python list I was able to figure this out. Basically I did this:

  nodes = []

  def process_subtree(c, path):
      name = c.get('Name') if c.tag == 'Node' else None
      if name:
          path.append(name)
          nodes.append('/'.join(path))

      for c1 in c:
          process_subtree(c1, path)

      if name:
          path.pop()

  process_subtree(tree.getroot(), [])

answered Nov 27, 2013 at 18:05

Larry Martell

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