Parsing XML Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide (2024)

From ordering essentials through Amazon and wardrobe shopping in Zara to booking vacations on Expedia, websites have become indispensable in this decade! Ever wondered how these websites display information to customers in an easily-interpretable way and also process and interact with the data in the backend?

There are certain file formats that bridge this gap, being interpretable to both machine language and humans. One such widely used format is XML, which stands short for Extensible Markup Language.

What is XML?

XML is a universal data format that makes sharing information between different systems easy. It’s organised like a tree, making it simple to store and find data. One of the main advantages of XML is its flexibility. This makes it a popular choice for applications such as web services, data exchange, and configuration files. Let's dive into XML and see how it powers the digital world with real world examples.

Understanding the structure of XML files

Before we dive into the details of how to parse XML files, let’s first understand the different parts of an XML document. In XML, an element is a fundamental building block of a document that represents a structured piece of information. The element’s content has to be enclosed between an opening tag and a closing tag (just like HTML) as shown below.

<title>Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone</title>

I’ll be using an example file, “travel_pckgs.xml,” which contains details of the different tour packages offered by a company. I’ll continue to use the same file throughout the blog for clarity.

<?xml version="1.0"?><travelPackages> <package id="Paris vacation"> <description>Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris and the french culture.</description> <destination>Paris, France</destination> <price>3000</price> <duration>7</duration> <payment> <EMIoption>yes</EMIoption> <refund>yes</refund> </payment> </package> <package id="Hawaii Adventure"> <description>Embark on an exciting adventure in Hawaii beaches!</description> <destination>Hawaii, USA</destination> <price>4000</price> <duration>10</duration> <payment> <EMIoption>no</EMIoption> <refund>no</refund> </payment> </package> <package id="Italian Getaway"> <description>Indulge in the beauty and charm of Italy and get an all-inclusive authentic Italian food tour!</description> <destination>Italy</destination> <price>2000</price> <duration>8</duration> <payment> <EMIoption>yes</EMIoption> <refund>no</refund> </payment> </package> <package id="Andaman Island Retreat"> <description>Experience the beauty of Island beaches,inclusive scuba diving and Night kayaking through mangroves.</description> <destination>Andaman and Nicobar Islands</destination> <price>800</price> <duration>8</duration> <payment> <EMIoption>no</EMIoption> <refund>yes</refund> </payment> </package></travelPackages>

The file has data of 4 tour packages, with details of destination, description, price and payment options provided by an agency. Let’s look at the breakdown of the different parts of the above XML:

Root Element: The topmost level element is referred as the root, which is <travelPackages> in our file. It contains all the other elements( various tours offered)
Attribute: ‘id’ is the attribute of each <package> element in our file. Note that the attribute has to have unique values (‘Paris vacation’, ‘Hawaii Adventure’, etc) for each element. The attribute and its value is usually mentioned inside the start tag as you can see.
Child Elements: The elements wrapped inside the root are the child elements. In our case, all the <package> tags are child elements, each storing details about a tour package.
Sub-Elements: A child element can have more sub-elements inside its structure. The <package> child element has sub-elements <description>, <destination>, <price>, <duration> and <payment>. The advantage of XML is that it allows you to store hierarchical information through multiple nested elements. The <payment> sub-element further has sub-elements <EMIoption> and <refund>, which denote whether a particular package has ‘pay through EMI’ and refund options or not.

Tip: You can create a Tree view of the XML file to gain a clear understanding using this tool. Check out the hierarchical tree view of our XML file!

Parsing XML Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide (1)

Great! We want to read XML data stored in these fields, search for, update, and make changes as needed for the website, right? This process is called XML parsing, where the XML data is split into pieces and different parts are identified.

Let's explore how to read XML file in python. There are multiple ways to parse XML in python with different libraries. Let’s dive into the first method!

Using Mini DOM to parse XML files

I’m sure you would have encountered DOM (Document Object Model), a standard API for representing XML files. Mini DOM is an inbuilt python module that minimally implements DOM.

How does mini DOM work?

It loads the input XML file into memory, creating a tree-like structure “DOM Tree” to store elements, attributes, and text content. As XML files also inherently have a hierarchical-tree structure, this method is convenient to navigate and retrieve information.

Let’s see how to import the package with the below code. You can parse the XML file using xml.dom.minidom.parse() function and also get the root element.

import xml.dom.minidom# parse the XML filexml_doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse('travel_pckgs.xml')# get the root elementroot = xml_doc.documentElementprint('Root is',root)

The output I got for the above code is:

>> Root is <DOM Element: travelPackages at 0x7f05824a0280>

Let’s say I want to print each package's place, duration, and price.

The getAttribute() function can be used to retrieve the value of an attribute of an element.

If you want to access all the elements under a particular tag, use the getElementsByTagName() method and provide the tag as input. The best part is that getElementsByTagName() can be used recursively, to extract nested elements.

# get all the package elementspackages = xml_doc.getElementsByTagName('package')# loop through the packages and extract the datafor package in packages: package_id = package.getAttribute('id') description = package.getElementsByTagName('description')[0].childNodes[0].data price = package.getElementsByTagName('price')[0].childNodes[0].data duration = package.getElementsByTagName('duration')[0].childNodes[0].data print('Package ID:', package_id) print('Description:', description) print('Price:', price)

The output of the above code is shown here, with the ID, description text, and price values of each package extracted and printed.

Package ID: Paris vacationDescription: Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris and the french culture.Price: 3000Package ID: Hawaii AdventureDescription: Embark on an exciting adventure in Hawaii beaches!Price: 4000Package ID: Italian GetawayDescription: Indulge in the beauty and charm of Italy and get an all-inclusive authentic Italian food tour!Price: 2000Package ID: Andaman Island RetreatDescription: Experience the beauty of Island beaches,inclusive scubadiving and Night kayaking through mangroves.Price: 800

Minidom parser also allows us to traverse the DOM tree from one element to its parent element, its first child element, last child, and so on. You can access the first child of the <package> element using the firstChild attribute. The extracted child element’s node name and value can also be printed through nodeName and nodeValue attributes as shown below.

# get the first package elementparis_package = xml_doc.getElementsByTagName('package')[0]# get the first child of the package elementfirst_child = paris_package.firstChild#print(first_child)>><DOM Element: description at 0x7f2e4800d9d0>Node Name: descriptionNode Value: None

You can verify that ‘description’ is the first child element of <package>. There’s also an attribute called childNodes that will return all the child elements present inside the current node. Check the below example and its output.

child_elements=paris_package.childNodesprint(child_elements)>>[<DOM Element: description at 0x7f057938e940>, <DOM Element: destination at 0x7f057938e9d0>, <DOM Element: price at 0x7f057938ea60>, <DOM Element: duration at 0x7f057938eaf0>, <DOM Element: payment at 0x7f057938eb80>]

Similar to this, minidom provides more ways to traverse like parentNode, lastChild nextSibling, etc. You can check all the available functions of the library here.

But, a major drawback of this method is the expensive memory usage as the entire file is loaded into memory. It’s impractical to use minidom for large files.

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Using ElementTree Library to parse XML files

ElementTree is a widely used built-in python XML parser that provides many functions to read, manipulate and modify XML files. This parser creates a tree-like structure to store the data in a hierarchical format.

Let’s start by importing the xml.etree.ElementTree library and calling our XML file's parse() function. You can also provide the input file in a string format and use the fromstring() function. After we initialize a parsed tree, we can use get root () function to retrieve the root tag as shown below.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ETtree = ET.parse('travel_pckgs.xml')#calling the root elementroot = tree.getroot()print("Root is",root)Output:>>Root is <Element 'travelPackages' at 0x7f93531eaa40>

The root tag ‘travelPackages’ is extracted!

Let’s say now we want to access all the first child tags of the root. We can use a simple for loop and iterate over it, printing the child tags like destination, price, etc...Note that if we had specified an attribute value inside the opening tag of the description, the parentheses wouldn't be empty. Check out the below snippet!

for x in root[0]: print(x.tag, x.attrib)Output:>>description {}destination {}price {}duration {}payment {}

Alternatively, the iter() function can help you find any element of interest in the entire tree. Let’s use this to extract the descriptions of each tour package in our file. Remember to use the ‘text’ attribute to extract the text of an element.

for x in root.iter('description'): print(x.text)Output:>>"Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris and the french culture.""Embark on an exciting adventure in Hawaii beaches!""Indulge in the beauty and charm of Italy and get an all-inclusive authentic Italian food tour!""Experience the beauty of Island beaches,inclusive scuba diving and Night kayaking through mangroves.

While using ElementTree, the basic for loop is pretty powerful to access the child elements. Let’s see how.

Parsing XML in python with a for loop

You can simply iterate through the child elements with a for loop, extracting the attributes as shown below.

for tour in root: print(tour.attrib)Output:>>{'id': 'Paris vacation'}{'id': 'Hawaii Adventure'}{'id': 'Italian Getaway'}{'id': 'Andaman Island Retreat'}

To handle complex querying and filtering, ElementTee has the findall() method. This method lets you access all the child elements of the tag passed as parameters. Let’s say you want to know the tour packages that are under $4000, and also have EMIoption as ‘yes’. Check the snippet.

for package in root.findall('package'): price = int(package.find('price').text) refund = package.find('payment/refund').text.strip("'") if price < 4000 and refund == 'yes': print(package.attrib['id'])

We basically iterate over packages through root.findall('package') and then extracts the price and refund with find() method. After this, we check the constraints and filter out the qualified packages that are printed below.

Output:

Paris vacation

Andaman Island Retreat

Using ElementTree, you can easily modify and update the elements and values of the XML file, unlike miniDOM and SAX. Let’s check how in the next section.

How to modify XML files with ElementTree?

Let’s say it is time for the Christmas holidays and the agency wants to double the package costs. ElementTree provides a set() function, which we can use to update the values of elements. In the below code, I have accessed the price of each package through iter() function and manipulated the prices. You can use the write() function to write a new XML file with updated elements.

for price in root.iter('price'):new_price = int(price.text)*2price.text = str(new_price)price.set('updated', 'yes')tree.write('christmas_packages.xml')

You should be able to find an output file like the one in the below image. If you recall, the prices for Paris Vacation and Hawaii Adventure are $3000 and $4000 in the original file.

Parsing XML Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide (2)

But, what if we want to add a new tag <stay> to the Andaman package to denote that the stay offered is ‘Premium private villa’. The SubElement() function of ElementTree lets us add new subtags as per need, as demonstrated in the below snippet. You should pass the element you want to modify and the new tag as parameters to the function.

ET.SubElement(root[3], 'stay')for x in root.iter('stay'):resort = 'Premium Private Villa'x.text = str(resort)

Parsing XML Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide (3)

Hope you got the results too! The package also provides pop() function, through which you can delete attributes and subelements if they are unnecessary.

Simple API for XML (SAX)

SAX is another python parser, which overcomes the shortcoming of miniDOM by reading the document sequentially. It does not load the entire tree into its memory, and also allows you to discard items, reducing memory usage.

First, let us create a SAX parser object and register callback functions for the different events that you want to handle in the XML document. To do this, I define a custom TravelPackageHandler class as shown below by sub-classing SAX’s ContentHandler.

import xml.sax# Define a custom SAX ContentHandler class to handle eventsclass TravelPackageHandler(xml.sax.ContentHandler): def __init__(self): self.packages = [] self.current_package = {} self.current_element = "" self.current_payment = {} def startElement(self, name, attrs): self.current_element = name if name == "package": self.current_package = {"id": attrs.getValue("id")} def characters(self, content): if self.current_element in ["description", "destination", "price", "duration", "EMIoption", "refund"]: self.current_package[self.current_element] = content.strip() if self.current_element == "payment": self.current_payment = {} def endElement(self, name): if name == "package": self.current_package["payment"] = self.current_payment self.packages.append(self.current_package) if name == "payment": self.current_package["payment"] = self.current_payment def startElementNS(self, name, qname, attrs): pass def endElementNS(self, name, qname): pass

In the above snippet, the startElement(), characters(), and endElement() methods are used to extract the data from the XML elements and attributes. As the SAX parser reads through the document, it triggers the registered callback functions for each event that it encounters. For example, if it encounters the start of a new element, it calls the startElement() function. Now, let’s use our custom handler to get the various package IDs parsing our example XML file.

# Create a SAX parser objectparser = xml.sax.make_parser()handler = TravelPackageHandler()parser.setContentHandler(handler)parser.parse("travel_pckgs.xml")for package in handler.packages: print(f'Package: {package["id"]}')

Output >>

Package: Paris vacation

Streaming Pull Parser for XML

This is the pulldom Python library that provides a streaming pull parser API with a DOM-like interface.

How does it work?

It processes the XML data in a "pull" manner. That is, you explicitly request the parser to provide the next event (e.g., start element, end element, text, etc.) in the XML data.

The syntax is familiar to what we have seen in the previous libraries. In the below code, I demonstrate how to import the library and use it to print the tours which have a duration of 4 days or more, and also provide a refund on cancellation.

from xml.dom.pulldom import parse, START_ELEMENTevents = parse("travel_pckgs.xml")for event, node in events: if event == START_ELEMENT and node.tagName == 'package': duration = int(node.getElementsByTagName('duration')[0].firstChild.data) refund = node.getElementsByTagName('refund')[0].firstChild.data.strip("'") if duration > 4 and refund == 'yes': print(f"Package: {node.getAttribute('id')}") print(f"Duration: {duration}") print(f"Refund: {refund}")

You should get output like:

Package: Paris vacation

Duration: 7

Refund: yes

Package: Andaman Island Retreat

Duration: 8

Refund: yes

Check the results! The pull parser combines a few features from miniDOM and SAX, making it relatively efficient.

Third-Party XML Parser Libraries like lxml

Built-in parsers might seem like using brute force for simple XML tasks, while lacking features for complex ones. This is were external libraries like lxml can help. These external libraries offer a range of capabilities, catering to different project requirements.

Using lxml Library to Parse XML Files

lxml is a powerful third-party library for XML parsing in Python, offering a rich set of features and high performance. It provides more advanced capabilities compared to the built-in ElementTree library, making it a preferred choice for complex XML parsing and manipulation tasks. Let's explore how to use lxml to parse XML files.

Parsing XML with lxml

Start by importing the lxml library and parsing your XML file using the parse function. You can also parse an XML string using the fromstring() function. After parsing the XML, use the getroot() method to retrieve the root element.

from lxml import etree# Parse the XML filetree = etree.parse('travel_pckgs.xml')# Calling the root elementroot = tree.getroot()print("Root is", root)Output:Root is <Element travelPackages at 0x7f93531eaa40>

The root tag travelPackages is extracted!

To access all the first child tags of the root, use a simple for loop to iterate over them, printing each child tag and its attributes.

for x in root[0]: print(x.tag, x.attrib)Output:>>description {}destination {}price {}duration {}payment {}

Using XPath for Complex Queries

XPath allows you to find elements with more complex queries. Let's extract the descriptions of each tour package using XPath.

descriptions = root.xpath('//description')for desc in descriptions: print(desc.text)Output:>>"Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris and the french culture.""Embark on an exciting adventure in Hawaii beaches!""Indulge in the beauty and charm of Italy and get an all-inclusive authentic Italian food tour!""Experience the beauty of Island beaches, inclusive scuba diving and Night kayaking through mangroves."

Iterating Through Child Elements

Iterating through child elements with a for loop can also be done using lxml, extracting attributes as shown below.

for tour in root: print(tour.attrib)Output:>>{'id': 'Paris vacation'}{'id': 'Hawaii Adventure'}{'id': 'Italian Getaway'}{'id': 'Andaman Island Retreat'}

Using lxml, you can efficiently parse, query, and manipulate XML files with advanced features and high performance, making it a robust choice for XML processing in Python.

Parsing XML files with Namespaces

When working with XML files that include namespaces, tags and attributes may have prefixes like prefix:tagname which expand to {uri}tagname, where the prefix is replaced with the full URI. Additionally, if there is a default namespace, its URI gets prepended to all non-prefixed tags.

Here’s an example of our XML file with namespaces:

<?xml version="1.0"?><travelPackages xmlns:ns="http://example.com/ns" xmlns:default="http://default.example.com"> <ns:package id="Paris vacation"> <default:description>Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris and the french culture.</default:description> <default:destination>Paris, France</default:destination> <default:price>3000</default:price> <default:duration>7</default:duration> </ns:package></travelPackages>

To parse this XML file, you need to account for both the prefixed and default namespaces. Here's how to handle it in Python:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ETdef parse_xml_with_namespaces(xml_file): # Define namespaces namespaces = { 'ns': 'http://example.com/ns', 'default': 'http://default.example.com' } # Parse the XML file and get the root element root = ET.parse(xml_file).getroot() # Extract data for package in root.findall('ns:package', namespaces): id = package.get('id') description = package.find('default:description', namespaces).text destination = package.find('default:destination', namespaces).text price = package.find('default:price', namespaces).text duration = package.find('default:duration', namespaces).text # Print extracted data (or handle it as needed) print(f"ID: {id}, Description: {description}, Destination: {destination}, Price: {price}, Duration: {duration}")

Let's understand the above code.

Namespace Definition: The namespaces dictionary maps namespace prefixes to their URIs.
Element Queries: Use the namespace prefixes to correctly locate elements. For example, 'ns:package' and 'default:description' are used to specify the exact tags within their respective namespaces.
Data Extraction: Extract and handle data from the XML elements as required.

This approach ensures that you accurately navigate and extract data from XML files with both default and prefixed namespaces.

Parsing Invalid XML

Python's standard XML libraries lack the ability to validate the structure of XML files. This means they can't parse and extract data from XML files that contain invalid characters such as &,#,$ or broken tags, or elements. Below is an example:

<?xml version="1.0"?><travelPackages> <package id="Paris vacation"> <description>Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris & the french culture.</description> <destination>Paris, France</destination></package></travelPackages>

At first glance, this might look like a valid XML. However, attempting to parse it will result in an error due to the & symbol inside the description element, which is an invalid character in XML. As a result, standard XML libraries will fail to parse this file. Let's explore a couple of methods to handle such invalid XML.

Method 1: Preprocessing XML Documents as Strings

For simple XML files like the one above, you can preprocess the XML document as a string to remove or replace invalid characters before passing it to the parser.

from xml.dom.minidom import parseStringinvalid_xml = """<?xml version="1.0"?><travelPackages> <package id="Paris vacation"> <description>Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris & the french culture.</description> <destination>Paris, France</destination> </package></travelPackages>"""# Preprocessingvalid_xml = invalid_xml.replace("&", "and")parsed_data = parseString(valid_xml)

In the preprocessing step, the replace method is used to substitute the & symbol in invalid_xml with "and". Running this script will parse the XML document without errors. Various preprocessing methods can be used, including Python's re module for more complex replacements using Regex expressions. However, for large XML documents, this method might become cumbersome.

Method 2: Using a Robust Parsing Library

If the invalid XML document is large, preprocessing can be challenging. Instead, you can use a more robust parsing library like Beautiful Soup, which can handle invalid XML characters, missing, or broken tags automatically:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoupinvalid_xml = """<?xml version="1.0"?><travelPackages> <package id="Paris vacation"> <description>Experience the magnificent beauty of Paris & the french culture.</description> <destination>Paris, France</destination> </package></travelPackages>"""soup = BeautifulSoup(invalid_xml, "lxml")print(soup.prettify())

Beautiful Soup can handle various XML issues, but it is slower than other XML parsing libraries like ElementTree or lxml. If performance is critical, preprocessing or other robust libraries might be more suitable.

Saving XML file to a csv

Once you have edited your XML file, you might want to save it in a CSV format for easier analysis or to use it with other applications. Let's walk through the steps to convert an XML file to a CSV file using Python. For this example, we will use the file travel_pckgs.xml, which contains travel package information.

Decide Rows and Columns: To convert XML data into a CSV format, you need to decide how to map XML elements into CSV rows and columns:

Rows: Each XML element that represents a distinct record should be converted into a row in the CSV file. In our example, each <package> element represents a separate travel package and should correspond to a row in the CSV file.
Columns: Each distinct piece of data within the XML elements should be a column in the CSV file. For our XML example:
- Columns include: id, description, destination, price, duration, EMIoption, and refund.
- Header Row: The first row in the CSV will contain these column names.

The script will use these mappings to write each package’s details into a new row, with the values extracted from each XML tag or attribute.

Write the Python Script: Use the following Python script to read the XML file and write its contents into a CSV file. This script parses the XML data, extracts the relevant fields, and writes them into a CSV file:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ETimport csvdef xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file): # Parse the XML file tree = ET.parse(xml_file) root = tree.getroot() # Open a CSV file for writing with open(csv_file, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f: writer = csv.writer(f) # Write the header header = ['id', 'description', 'destination', 'price', 'duration', 'EMIoption', 'refund'] writer.writerow(header) # Write the rows for package in root.findall('package'): row = [ package.get('id'), package.find('description').text, package.find('destination').text, package.find('price').text, package.find('duration').text, package.find('payment/EMIoption').text, package.find('payment/refund').text ] writer.writerow(row)# Example usagexml_file = 'travel_pckgs.xml'csv_file = 'travel_packages.csv'xml_to_csv(xml_file, csv_file)

Below is how the formatted data will look like:

Parsing XML Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide (4)

Turning the XML data into a CSV file makes it easier to analyze and use. It also helps you expand your database more easily. Plus, you can use the data directly in your apps, similar to JSON. This method is handy for getting data from websites that don’t have a public API.

Summary

I’m sure you have a good grasp of the various parsers available in python by now. Knowing when to choose which parser to save time and resources is equally important. Among all the parsers we saw, ElementTree provides maximum compatibility with XPath expressions that help perform complex queries. Minidom has an easy-to-use interface and can be chosen for dealing with small files, but is too slow in case of large files. At the same time, SAX is used in situations where the XML file is constantly updated, as in the case of real-time Machine learning.

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