Parse XML using Minidom in Python

DOM (document object model) is a cross-language API from W3C i.e. World Wide Web Consortium for accessing and modifying XML documents. Python enables you to parse XML files with the help of xml.dom.minidom, which is the minimal implementation of the DOM interface. It is simpler than the full DOM API and should be considered as smaller.

Steps for Parsing XML are – 

• Import the module

import xml.dom.minidom

Let say, your XML  files will have the following things, 

• Use the parse function to load and parse the XML file. In the below case docs stores the result of the parse function

docs = xml.dom.minidom.parse("test.xml")

• Let’s print the child tagname and nodename of the XML file. 

Python3

import xml.dom.minidom

docs = xml.dom.minidom.parse("test.xml")

print(docs.nodeName)
print(docs.firstChild.tagName)

Output:

#document
info

• Now to get the information from the tag-name, you need to call dom standard function getElementsByTagName and getAttribute for fetching the required attributes. 

Python3

import xml.dom.minidom


docs = xml.dom.minidom.parse("test.xml")

print(docs.nodeName)
print(docs.firstChild.tagName)

skills = docs.getElementsByTagName("skills")

print("%d skills" % skills.length)
for i in skills:
    print(i.getAttribute("name"))

Output:

#document
info
4 skills
Machine learning
Deep learning
Python
Bootstrap