Filtering XML in Python

Question

I need to write a filter to discard some elements, tags and blocks in my XML Files. In the following you can see what are my xml examples and expected outputs. I am somehow confused about the differences between element, tag, attribute in the elemetTree. My test does not work!

Filter:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as xee

def test(input):
    doc=xee.fromstring(input)
    print xee.tostring(doc)

    #RemoveTimeStampAttribute
    for elem in doc.findall('Component'):
        if 'timeStamp' in elem.attrib:
            del elem.attrib['timeStamp']

    #RemoveTimeStampElements
    for elem in doc.findall('TimeStamp'):
        del elem 
    print xee.tostring(doc) 
    return xee.tostring(doc)

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:26:16Z

1

First of all, you are removing the attribute incorrectly, see if timeStamp is in the element's attrib dictionary and then use del to remove it:

def amdfilter(input):
    doc = xee.fromstring(input)

    for node in doc.findall('Component'):
        if 'timeStamp' in node.attrib:
            del node.attrib['timeStamp']

    return xee.tostring(doc)

Also, since you are testing only the attribute removal here, change your expectation to:

expected = '<ComponentMain><Component /></ComponentMain>'

Complete test (it passes):

import unittest
from amdfilter import *

class FilterTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def testRemoveTimeStampAttribute(self):
        input = '<?xml version="1.0"?><ComponentMain><Component timeStamp="2014"></Component></ComponentMain>'
        output = amdfilter(input)
        expected = '<ComponentMain><Component /></ComponentMain>'
        self.assertEqual(expected, output)

Note that I don't care here about the xml declaration line (it could be easily added).

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:26

CommunityBot

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answered Aug 5, 2014 at 15:20

alecxe

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4 Comments

Orcl User Over a year ago

tnx, it works..just one question, is xml version tag removed when we revert the input to String?

Orcl User Over a year ago

And how to delete a node itself? Question is edited.

alecxe Over a year ago

@OrclUser ok, TimeStamp can be anywhere in the xml, or at a specific location?

Orcl User Over a year ago

It is either an attribute or an element or a block..You can find in my examples, in the first one it is an attribute and I just need to remove that attribute, in the second one it is an element and I need to remove the whole element and in the third one the whole block.

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