Comments on: Seeking Elegant Pythonic Solution

By: Tom Lynn

Tom Lynn — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:45:56 +0000

… or if you really want attribute access use the Python Cookbook Bunch recipe:

import lxml.html

class Result(object):
def __init__(self, pairs):
self.__dict__.update(pairs)

results = [Result((node.tag, node.text_content()) for node in result)
for result in lxml.html.fromstring(xml).xpath('//result')]

The choice between using node.text and node.text_content() depends how you want to handle unexpected child nodes. If you might get embedded HTML (e.g. a sup tag to superscript a trademark sign), use node.text_content() as above, otherwise you’re ok with node.text.

By: Tom Lynn

Tom Lynn — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:48:27 +0000

import lxml.html

xml = lxml.html.fromstring(xml)
results = [dict((node.tag, node.text_content()) for node in result)
for result in xml.xpath('//result')]

By: James

James — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:19:07 +0000

While it looks like you already have a solution, I tend to use BeautifulStoneSoup for XML parsing like this:

http://gist.github.com/294341

BeautifulStoneSoup gives you Unicode *and* the class it gives you appears to inherit all the standard methods for type str.

Hope that helps!

By: Kevin Horn

Kevin Horn — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:13:10 +0000

I probably would have used lxml.etree to get a list of “result” elements, and iterated over each of those to get a list of the children of each, then created a dictionary from the keys (elem.tag), and values (elem.text) and then proceeded from there. If this makes any sense to you, then you’ve probbaly stayed up too late. I know I have.

Alex’s solution is probably better though.

By: Michael Foord

Michael Foord — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:59:47 +0000

Whilst you *should* use the solution suggested by Alex, I still like my horrid little one liner with reduce and a lambda:

reduce(lambda result, attr: getattr(result, attr), [the_object] + list(the_string.split(‘.’)))