Create a search engine using python ( search from an XML file only )

Question

I have details like this on an XML file

<note>
<id>51</id>
<Name>Jani</Name>
<city>Frankfurt</city>
<IQ>Intelligent</IQ>
</note>

<note>
<id>71</id>
<Name>Peter</Name>
<city>Paris</city>
<IQ>Average</IQ>
</note>

<note>
<id>81</id>
<Name>Asho</Name>
<city>Paris</city>
<IQ>Intelligent</IQ>
</note>

Given these details, I want to implement a search engine that should enable the user to search for all the 'Intelligent' people in the file.

Kindly suggest me the best way to do it in python.

You can use xml.etree.elementtree for parsing the xml and then search for `Intelligent` people http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html — Ankur Ankan, Jun 14 '13 at 09:22
possible duplicate of [How do I parse XML in python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1912434/how-do-i-parse-xml-in-python) — Damian Leszczyński - Vash, Jun 14 '13 at 09:23
@Vash, I do not just want to count, but to get all the information of the 'intelligent' people — viggie, Jun 14 '13 at 09:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 14 '13 at 09:28

1

Use lxml and XPath:

from StringIO import StringIO
from lxml import etree

xml = """<root>
<note>
<id>51</id>
<Name>Jani</Name>
<city>Frankfurt</city>
<IQ>Intelligent</IQ>
</note>

<note>
<id>71</id>
<Name>Peter</Name>
<city>Paris</city>
<IQ>Average</IQ>
</note>

<note>
<id>81</id>
<Name>Asho</Name>
<city>Paris</city>
<IQ>Intelligent</IQ>
</note>

</root>"""

tree = etree.parse(StringIO.StringIO(xml))
for note in tree.xpath("//note[IQ='Intelligent']"):
    print note.getchildren()[1].tag + "=" + note.getchildren()[1].text

This prints:

Name=Jani
Name=Asho

answered Jun 14 '13 at 09:28

I want the search engine to get all the information of all the 'Intelligent' people, so that I can access it to use for some other purpose. – viggie Jun 14 '13 at 09:42
You can do that. Just access the information of each `note`. See the lxml documentation for details. – Jun 14 '13 at 09:44

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 14 '13 at 09:22

if the file is small them the libary xml.mindom can give you an easy to transvert data structure if the file is larger I would suggest xml.etree.cElementTree

alternativly you could preparse your file as needed, for example: make a dict (or list if all numeric ids are used) that has tuples/list with relevant data then make a name, city and IQ dict that contains lists with ids such that:

note[51] = (51,'Jani', 'Frankfurt', 'Intelligent')

and

iq_dict['Intelligent'] = (81, 51)

etc..

Create a search engine using python ( search from an XML file only )

2 Answers2