Using the XML module to parse XML data
In this next section, I will walk through some of the steps for using Python to parse and process XML data in a basic project to convert a dataset from XML to JSON.
In Python, XML is represented using a tree-like structure and parsed using the xml.etree.ElementTree module. Navigating this tree is a bit more sophisticated than navigating the structure of JSON data because the structure of XML does not fit as neatly into python data structures.
The first step to processing XML data is to read the XML data into Python's tree-like XML representation with the xml.etree.ElementTree module, using the following steps:
- Import the
xml.etree.ElementTreemodule. - Open the file containing the XML data.
- Use the
ElementTree.parse()function to create anElementTreeobject. - Use the
.getrootfunction of theElementTreeobject to return an element object representing the root of the element tree.
The result is a representation of the XML data in python that you can navigate...
