linux - extract text from xml documents in python

Question

This is the sample xml document :

<bookstore>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>300.00</price>
    </book>

    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling </author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>625.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>

I want to extract the text without specifying the elements how can i do this , because i have 10 such documents. I want so because my problem is that user is entering some word which I don't know , it has to be searched in all of the 10 xml documents in their respective text portions. For this to happen I should know where the text lies without knowing about the element. One more thing that all these documents are different.

Please Help!!

Answer 1

Using the lxml library with an xpath query is possible:

xml="""<bookstore>
    <book category="COOKING">
        <title lang="english">Everyday Italian</title>
        <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>300.00</price>
    </book>

    <book category="CHILDREN">
        <title lang="english">Harry Potter</title>
        <author>J K. Rowling </author>
        <year>2005</year>
        <price>625.00</price>
    </book>
</bookstore>
"""
from lxml import etree
root = etree.fromstring(xml).getroot()
root.xpath('/bookstore/book/*/text()')
# ['Everyday Italian', 'Giada De Laurentiis', '2005', '300.00', 'Harry Potter', 'J K. Rowling ', '2005', '625.00']

Although you don't get the category....