Processing RSS/RDF via xml.dom.minidom

Question

I'm trying to process a delicious rss feed via python. Here's a sample:

...
  <item rdf:about="http://weblist.me/"&gt;
    <title>WebList - The Place To Find The Best List On The Web</title>
    <dc:date>2009-12-24T17:46:14Z</dc:date>
    <link>http://weblist.me/&lt;/link&gt;
    ...
  </item>
  <item rdf:about="http://thumboo.com/"&gt;
    <title>Thumboo! Free Website Thumbnails and PHP Script to Generate Web Screenshots</title>
    <dc:date>2006-10-24T18:11:32Z</dc:date>
    <link>http://thumboo.com/&lt;/link&gt;
...

The relevant code is:

def getText(nodelist):
    rc = ""
    for node in nodelist:
        if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
            rc = rc + node.data
    return rc

dom = xml.dom.minidom.parse(file)
items = dom.getElementsByTagName("item")
for i in items:
    title = i.getElementsByTagName("title")
    print getText(title)

I would think this would print out each title, but instead I get basically get blank output. I'm sure I'm doing something stupid wrong, but no idea what?

Answer 1

You are passing the title nodes to getText, whose nodeTypes are not node.TEXT_NODE. You have to loop over all the children of the node instead in your getText method:

def getTextSingle(node):
    parts = [child.data for child in node.childNodes if child.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE]
    return u"".join(parts)

def getText(nodelist):
    return u"".join(getTextSingle(node) for node in nodelist)

Even better, call node.normalize() before calling getTextSingle which ensures that consecutive children of type node.TEXT_NODE are merged into a single node.TEXT_NODE.