Mappet has been created to enable an easy an intuitive way to work with XML structures in Python code.
A well known lxml module has been used under the hood, mainly due to XML parsing performance.
Mappet accepts a string with valid XML, an lxml.etree._Element object or a dict representing the XML tree.
>>> import mappet >>> f = open('example.xml', 'r') >>> m = mappet.Mappet(f.read())
As an example, an XML document of the following structure has been used:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='iso-8859-2'?>
<a-message>
<head>
<id seq="20" tstamp="2015-07-13T10:55:25+02:00"/>
<initiator>Mr Sender</initiator>
<date>2015-07-13T10:56:05.597420+02:00</date>
<type>reply-type</type>
</head>
<auth>
<user first-name="Name" last-name="LastName">id</user>
</auth>
<status>
<result>OK</result>
</status>
<reply>
<cars>
<Car>
<id>12345</id>
<Manufacturer>BMW</Manufacturer>
<Model_Name>X6</Model_Name>
<Body>SUV</Body>
<Fuel>Diesel</Fuel>
<Doors>5</Doors>
<ccm>3000</ccm>
<HP>256</HP>
<TransType>Automatic</TransType>
<seats>5</seats>
<weight>3690</weight>
</Car>
<Car>
<id>54321</id>
<Manufacturer>BMW</Manufacturer>
<Model_Name>X1</Model_Name>
<Body>SUV</Body>
<Fuel>Diesel</Fuel>
<Doors>5</Doors>
<ccm>3000</ccm>
<HP>198</HP>
<TransType>Automatic</TransType>
<seats>5</seats>
<weight>2890</weight>
</Car>
</cars>
</reply>
</a-message>Every XML node can be accessed in two ways: by attribute and item access.
Dictionary access is possible thanks to XML document being represented as a Python dictionary. Conversion of values is done explicitly.
By default, values are returned as str.
>>> m['reply']['cars']['Car'][0]['Manufacturer'] 'BMW'
Nodes' names are case-sensitive.
Due to restrictions in Python variable names, tag names are normalized for attribute access. Tag names are normalized to lowercase and hyphens to underlines.
Same example using attribute access (__repr__ is responsible for representing the tag):
>>> m.reply.cars.car[0].manufacturer BMW
To get a string representation use get().
>>> m.reply.cars.car[0].manufacturer.get() 'BMW'
get() has two parameters, default and callback. The first one is returned when then node's value is empty, the second is a function to be called upon the returned value.
>>> m.reply.cars.car[0].ccm.get(callback=int) 3000
Alternatively, one can use built-in helper functions, defined in helpers.py
>>> m.reply.cars.car[0].ccm.to_int() 3000
- to_bool
- to_int
- to_str
- to_string
- to_float
- to_time
- to_datetime
- to_date