Re: CDATA extraction

On 17-Dec-03, at 9:01 AM, [email protected] wrote:

> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!-- A problem to get value in CDATA block -->
> <problem>
> <title>My problem</title>
> <content>How can I get the string shown in the CDATA marked
> sections?</content>
> <![CDATA[ "Please help me." ]]>
> </problem>

OK, first off, there are several ways of going about this, especially 
XPath, walking the DOM tree, or event-driven.  Here is an example of 
walking the DOM tree, but keep in mind that there may be better ways 
depending on what you're trying to accomplish.  This code assumes that 
your example is saved as a file "test.xml" in the current directory.

=========== snip ============

from xml.dom.ext.reader import PyExpat
from xml.dom import Node

data = file('test.xml')
reader = PyExpat.Reader()
document = reader.fromStream(data)
data.close()

def walkToCDATA(node):
   if node.nodeType == Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE:
     print node.nodeValue
   for child in node.childNodes:
     walkToCDATA(child)

walkToCDATA(document)

=========== snip ============

I hope that helps.

--Dethe

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. 
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by 
definition, not smart enough to debug it. "  --Brian Kernighan