Extracting values from XML using Python

Question

I have the following xml extracted from another xml file.

<notifications>
  <notification name="ccmSmtp" oid="1.3.6.1" status="current">
    <objects>
      <object module="callhome" name="ccmSmtp" />
    </objects>
    <description>This is a description</description>
  </notification>
  <notification name="ccmAlertGroup" oid="1.3.6.1" status="current">
    <objects>
      <object module="callhome" name="callHome" />
    </objects>
    <description>This is a description</description>
  </notification>
  <notification name="ccmAlert" oid="1.3.6.1" status="current">
    <objects>
      <object module="callhome" name="callHome" />
    </objects>
    <description>This is a description</description>
  </notification>
  <notification name="ccmSmtp" oid="1.3.6.1" status="current">
    <objects></objects>
    <description>This is a description</description>
  </notification>
</notifications>

I'm using the following Python code.

from xml.dom import minidom

xmldoc = minidom.parse('example.xml')
grammarNode = xmldoc.childNodes[2]
notificationsNode = grammarNode.childNodes[9]
print notificationsNode.toxml()

This python code gives the output of the xml which i have given above.

I tried the following to get the attribute values

notificationlist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('notification')
print notificationlist[0].toxml()
notification1 = notificationlist[0]
key = notification1.attributes.keys()

Using this I'm able to get only the values of the fist set of notification.

How is that i can get all the values of the attributes and store it in separate variables?

I'm not familiar with minidom, but I would guess that you're only getting the first since you're only asking for the first entry in notificationlist. Why not set up a foreach? for item in notificationlist: ... — emragins
– emragins, Commented Apr 20, 2011 at 15:37

jathanism · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-20 19:12:46Z

1

If you want to get the attributes for each item in notificationlist, you could do this:

attrslist = [dict(node.attributes.items()) for node in notificationlist]
print attrslist[0]
# => {u'status': u'current', u'oid': u'1.3.6.1', u'name': u'ccmSmtp'}
print attrslist[0]['status']
# => current

From here it would just be a matter of iterating this new list and pulling the attributes by name for each <notification> element in notificationlist.

for n in attrslist:
   status = n['status']
   oid = n['oid']
   name = n['name']
   # blah

answered Apr 20, 2011 at 19:12

jathanism

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zedman9991 · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-21 18:53:34Z

Assuming that your 'notificationlist = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName('notification')' is generated from xmldoc which is the output value you listed you should have four elements. Thus just focusing on element 0 with notificationlist[0] will only address that first element. Here is some code with a modification to your samlpe xmldoc to make the discriptions differ by prepending aaa, bbb, ccc, ddd. You can capture the data by replacing the print statements---

for x in notificationlist:
  print '*' * 15
  print x.getElementsByTagName('description').item(0).childNodes[0].data 
  print
  for y in x.attributes.keys():
    print y
    print x.attributes.getNamedItem(y).nodeValue
    print '-' *15



***************
      aaaThis is a description   

status
current
---------------
oid
1.3.6.1
---------------
name
ccmSmtp
---------------
***************
        bbbThis is a description   

status
current
---------------
oid
1.3.6.1
---------------
name
ccmAlertGroup
---------------
***************
     cccThis is a description   

status
current
---------------
oid
1.3.6.1
---------------
name
ccmAlert
---------------
***************
       dddThis is a description   

status
current
---------------
oid
1.3.6.1
---------------
name
ccmSmtp
---------------

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