Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 22 ■ PROJECT 3: XML FOR ALL OCCASIONS 425
WHAT ABOUT DOM?
There are two common ways of dealing with XML in Python (and other programming languages, for that matter):
SAX and DOM (the Document Object Model). A SAX parser reads through the XML file and tells you what it sees
(text, tags, attributes), storing only small parts of the document at a time; this makes SAX simple, fast, and
memory-efficient, which is why I have chosen to use it in this chapter. DOM takes another approach: It constructs
a data structure (the document tree), which represents the entire document. This is slower and requires more
memory, but can be useful if you want to manipulate the structure of your document, for example.
For information about using DOM in Python, check out the Python Library Reference (http://
www.python.org/doc/lib/module-xml.dom.html). In addition to the standard DOM handling, the standard
library contains two other modules, xml.dom.minidom (a simplified DOM) and xml.dom.pulldom (a cross
between SAX and DOM, which reduces memory requirements).
A very fast and simple XML parser (which doesn’t really use DOM, but which creates a complete document
tree from your XML document) is PyRXP (http://www.reportlab.org/pyrxp.html). And then there is
ElementTree (available from http://effbot.org/zone), which is flexible and easy to use.
Creating a Simple Content Handler
There are several event types available when parsing with SAX, but let’s restrict ourselves to
three: the beginning of an element (the occurrence of an opening tag), the end of an element
(the occurrence of a closing tag), and plain text (characters). To parse the XML file, let’s use the
parse function from the xml.sax module. This function takes care of reading the file and generating
the events—but as it generates these events, it needs some event handlers to call. These
event handlers will be implemented as methods of a content handler object. You’ll subclass the
ContentHandler class from xml.sax.handler because it implements all the necessary event handlers
(as dummy operations that have no effect), and you can override only the ones you need.
Let’s begin with a minimal XML parser (assuming that your XML file is called website.xml):
from xml.sax.handler import ContentHandler
from xml.sax import parse
class TestHandler(ContentHandler): pass
parse('website.xml', TestHandler())
If you execute this program, seemingly nothing happens, but you shouldn’t get any error
messages either. Behind the scenes, the XML file is parsed, and the default event handlers are
called—but because they don’t do anything, you won’t see any output.
Let’s try a simple extension. Add the following method to the TestHandler class:
def startElement(self, name, attrs):
print name, attrs.keys()