I think I'm missing something basic. I'd like to access the text of an XML element and replace it. For example, if I have this:
<name>Fred</name> I'd like to be able to change Fred to John
I've read a lot of sites about ElementTree and BeautifulSoup but I'm still stuck. Could someone provide a very simple example?
Like this?
use BeautifulSoup's soup.find() method to find the HTML tag:
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup('<html><body><name>Fred</name><html><body>')
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><body><name>Fred</name><html><body>')
>>> name = soup.find('name')
>>> name
<name>Fred</name>
>>>
use tag.string = newstring to replace the string of it:
>>> name.string = 'John'
>>> name
<name>John</name>
>>> soup
<html><body><name>John</name><html><body></body></html></body></html>
>>>
Then we done, check the document for more details.
A python2.7 version of beautiful soup
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup=BeautifulSoup("<name>Fred</name>")
soup.find("name").string="John"
print(soup)
output
<name>John</name>
Alternative using regex
import re
htmltext="<name>John</name>"
new_htmltext=re.sub("(<name>).*(</name>)","\\1Fred\\2",htmltext)
print(new_htmltext)
Why not just parse it as text? The format of the data doesn't always necessitate the use of a special library for working with it.
>>> a = 'stuff<name>Fred</name>otherstuff'
>>> a.replace('<name>Fred</name>', '<name>John</name>')
'stuff<name>John</name>otherstuff'
