Get Element value with minidom, Python

Question

Hi Guys,

I am creating a GUI frontend for the Eve Online API in Python.

I have successfully pulled the XML data from their server.

I am trying to grab the value from a node called "name"

from xml.dom.minidom import parse
dom = parse("C:\\eve.xml")
name = dom.getElementsByTagName('name')
print name

This seems to find the node ok but the output is below:

[<DOM Element: name at 0x11e6d28>]

How could I get it to print the value of the node?

Cheers

Answer 1

It should just be

name[0].nodeValue

Answer 2

Probably something like this if it's the text part you want...

from xml.dom.minidom import parse
dom = parse("C:\\eve.xml")
name = dom.getElementsByTagName('name')

print " ".join(t.nodeValue for t in name[0].childNodes if t.nodeType == t.TEXT_NODE)

The text part of a node is considered a node in itself placed as a child-node of the one you asked for. Thus you will want to go through all its children and find all child nodes that are text nodes. A node can have several text nodes; eg.

<name>
  blabla
  <somestuff>asdf</somestuff>
  znylpx
</name>

You want both 'blabla' and 'znylpx'; hence the " ".join(). You might want to replace the space with a newline or so, or perhaps by nothing.

Answer 3

I know this question is pretty old now, but I thought you might have an easier time with ElementTree

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import datetime

f = ET.XML(data)

for element in f:
    if element.tag == "currentTime":
        # Handle time data was pulled
        currentTime = datetime.datetime.strptime(element.text, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    if element.tag == "cachedUntil":
        # Handle time until next allowed update
        cachedUntil = datetime.datetime.strptime(element.text, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
    if element.tag == "result":
        # Process list of skills
        pass

I know that's not super specific, but I just discovered it, and so far it's a lot easier to get my head around than the minidom (since so many nodes are essentially white space).

For instance, you have the tag name and the actual text together, just as you'd probably expect:

>>> element[0]
<Element currentTime at 40984d0>
>>> element[0].tag
'currentTime'
>>> element[0].text
'2010-04-12 02:45:45'e