How to transform an XML file using XSLT in Python?

Question

Good day! Need to convert xml using xslt in Python. I have a sample code in php.

How to implement this in Python or where to find something similar? Thank you!

$xmlFileName = dirname(__FILE__)."example.fb2";
$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->load($xmlFileName);

$xslFileName = dirname(__FILE__)."example.xsl";
$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load($xslFileName);

// Configure the transformer
$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules
echo $proc->transformToXML($xml);

R Sahu · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-17 03:27:27Z

143

Using lxml,

import lxml.etree as ET

dom = ET.parse(xml_filename)
xslt = ET.parse(xsl_filename)
transform = ET.XSLT(xslt)
newdom = transform(dom)
print(ET.tostring(newdom, pretty_print=True))

edited Aug 17, 2019 at 3:27

R Sahu

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answered May 22, 2013 at 18:23

unutbu

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7 Comments

KevinLeng Over a year ago

Hello, I have one more question here. If the xml file is large, the efficiency of "newdom = transform(dom)" is very bad. I tried to parse a large xml file (>100MB), it will cost a long time (>4 hours) to transform. Do you have any good advice about transforming xml file with xslt using python lxml?

unutbu Over a year ago

Under the hood, lxml is using libxslt to transform the XML. I don't know of anything you can do to speed this up. Maybe if you post your XSLT in a new question, someone will be able to suggest an improvement.

programiss Over a year ago

Thanks. I have tried using write with no luck. How do you write contents to file?

Stabby Over a year ago

@programiss What you mean with no luck? Etree.write(file, pretty_print) is the method to use. Maybe you passed wrong argument? That's common mistake. It's supposed to be writable object (eg. file or sys.stdout, etc), so not just filename string.

Patrick Ohly Over a year ago

With Python 3, one has to produce a unicode string when writing to stdout: print(ET.tostring(newdom, pretty_print=True, encoding="unicode"))

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R Sahu · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-17 03:28:34Z

6

LXML is a widely used high performance library for XML processing in python based on libxml2 and libxslt - it includes facilities for XSLT as well.

edited Aug 17, 2019 at 3:28

R Sahu

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answered May 22, 2013 at 18:22

miku

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Comments

Maliq · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-17 10:27:29Z

4

The best way is to do it using lxml, but it only support XSLT 1

import os
import lxml.etree as ET

inputpath = "D:\\temp\\"
xsltfile = "D:\\temp\\test.xsl"
outpath = "D:\\output"


for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(inputpath):
            for filename in filenames:
                if filename.endswith(('.xml', '.txt')):
                    dom = ET.parse(inputpath + filename)
                    xslt = ET.parse(xsltfile)
                    transform = ET.XSLT(xslt)
                    newdom = transform(dom)
                    infile = unicode((ET.tostring(newdom, pretty_print=True)))
                    outfile = open(outpath + "\\" + filename, 'a')
                    outfile.write(infile)

to use XSLT 2 you can check options from Use saxon with python

answered Oct 17, 2017 at 10:27

Maliq

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2 Comments

YaP Over a year ago

for people using XSLT3.x this is the way!

RolfBly Over a year ago

Long story short: for XSLT 2 and up, use SaxonC. As @Maliq suggests, lxml does not support any higher than XSLT 1. In my case, the line transform = ET.XSLT(xslt) errors because my xsltfile has <xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" in it. See here.

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