The trouble with "dynamic attributes".

Sun Sep 19 02:47:26 EDT 2010

On 09/18/10 03:53, Ethan Furman wrote:
> Lie Ryan wrote:
> [snip]
>> And even dict-syntax is not perfect for accessing XML file, e.g.:
>>>> <a>
>> <b>foo</b>
>> <b>bar</b>
>> </a>
>>>> should a['b'] be 'foo' or 'bar'?
>> Attribute style access would also fail in this instance -- how is this
> worked-around?

By not having multiple b in the first place!
However, if you cannot avoid having duplicates, then you would have to
use a different approach:
SAX (Simple API for XML; Java has a weird sense of simplicity):
import xml.sax as sax
from xml.sax.handler import ContentHandler
class MyHandler(ContentHandler):
 def __init__(self):
 self.inB = False
 def startElement(self, name, attrs):
 if name == 'b':
 self.inB = True
 def characters(self, ch):
 if self.inB:
 print ch
 def endElement(self, name):
 if name == 'b':
 self.inB = False
data = '<a>Foo<c>Evil</c>Bar</a>'
sax.parseString(data, MyHandler())
or in ElementTree:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
data = '<a>Foo<c>Evil</c>Bar</a>'
a = et.fromstring(data)
for elem in a.findall('b'):
 print elem.text