I just learned Prototype for Javascript. It's super convenient: using the $ shortcut, accessing xml elements is not painful any more!
The question: is there a Prototype-like extension for Python?
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I'm not sure quite what you are after when you say $ expanding but there's an xml library for python: docs.python.org/library/xml.dom.minidom.html.g.d.d.c– g.d.d.c2010-09-17 05:23:02 +00:00Commented Sep 17, 2010 at 5:23
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1I don't wanna start any flame-war type scenario, but JQuery is a similar library that has a much larger user-base.JKirchartz– JKirchartz2010-09-17 05:33:09 +00:00Commented Sep 17, 2010 at 5:33
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1 Answer
Python has lxml which has the xpath method wherein you could use xpath expressions to select elements. As I understand it, $ in prototype searches and returns an element that has a particular id, in which case could be translated in xpath to *[@id=<someid>] like so:
>>> import lxml.etree
>>> tree = lxml.etree.XML("<root><a id='1'/><b id='2'/></root>")
>>> tree.xpath("*[@id=1]")
[<Element a at c3bc30>]
>>> lxml.etree.tostring(tree.xpath("*[@id=1]")[0])
'<a id="1"/>'
I think the Python standard library includes support for a subset of xpath in ElementTree too so you might be able to implement that there somehow if you do not wish to install lxml (which isn't included in stdlib)...
