Parsing XML with DOM APIs in Python

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a programming interface for HTML and XML(Extensible markup language) documents. It defines the logical structure of documents and the way a document is accessed and manipulated.

Parsing XML with DOM APIs in python is pretty simple. For the purpose of example we will create a sample XML document (sample.xml) as below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<company>
    <name>GeeksForGeeks Company</name>
    <staff id="1">
        <name>Amar Pandey</name>
        <salary>8.5 LPA</salary>
    </staff>
    <staff id="2">
        <name>Akbhar Khan</name>
        <salary>6.5 LPA</salary>
    </staff>
    <staff id="3">
        <name>Anthony Walter</name>
        <salary>3.2 LPA</salary>
    </staff>
</company>

Now, let’s parse the above XML using python. The below code demonstrates the process,

from xml.dom import minidom

doc = minidom.parse("sample.xml")

# doc.getElementsByTagName returns the NodeList
name = doc.getElementsByTagName("name")[0]
print(name.firstChild.data)

staffs = doc.getElementsByTagName("staff")
for staff in staffs:
        staff_id = staff.getAttribute("id")
        name = staff.getElementsByTagName("name")[0]
        salary = staff.getElementsByTagName("salary")[0]
        print("id:% s, name:% s, salary:% s" %
              (staff_id, name.firstChild.data, salary.firstChild.data))

Output:

GeeksForGeeks Company
id:1, name: Amar Pandey, salary:8.5 LPA
id:2, name: Akbar Khan, salary:6.5 LPA
id:3, name: Anthony Walter, salary:3.2 LPA

The same can also be done using a user-defined function as shown in the code below:

from xml.dom import minidom

doc = minidom.parse("sample.xml")

# user-defined function
def getNodeText(node):

    nodelist = node.childNodes
    result = []
    for node in nodelist:
        if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
            result.append(node.data)
    return ''.join(result)

name = doc.getElementsByTagName("name")[0]
print("Company Name : % s \n" % getNodeText(name))


staffs = doc.getElementsByTagName("staff")
for staff in staffs:
        staff_id = staff.getAttribute("id")
        name = staff.getElementsByTagName("name")[0]
        salary = staff.getElementsByTagName("salary")[0]
        print("id:% s, name:% s, salary:% s" %
              (staff_id, getNodeText(name), getNodeText(salary)))

Output:

Company Name : GeeksForGeeks Company 

id:1, name:Amar Pandey, salary:8.5 LPA
id:2, name:Akbhar Khan, salary:6.5 LPA
id:3, name:Anthony Walter, salary:3.2 LPA