How to get data for BeautifulSoup Xml Parser

Question

Hi,

I'm trying to parse an XML file with BeautifulSoup. In all tutorials on the net, the content of the xml is given like

xml = "<doc><tag1>Contents 1<tag2>Contents 2<tag1>Contents 3"
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)

but I want to give only xml file's path. In mechanize one can use get_data() method but it only works for html files. Any sugestions ?

Answer 1

The BeautifulSoup documentation says that:

"A Beautiful Soup constructor takes an XML or HTML document in the form of a string (or an open file-like object). It parses the document and creates a corresponding data structure in memory."

In the formulation of your question, you use BeautifulStoneSoup, and allthough the online documentation uses strings, the docstring for the constructor reveals that:

"The Soup object is initialized as the 'root tag', and the provided markup (which can be a string or a file-like object) is fed into the underlying parser."