Search for specific text in an element of XML with DOM (Python)

Question

For a program in Python I am looking for a way to find a specific text in an element of XML and to find out which node number it is.

This is the xml:

-<shortcut>
<label>33060</label>
<label2>Common Shortcut</label2>
</shortcut>

-<shortcut>
<label>Test</label>
</shortcut>

Of course I know it is probably node number 2 in here, but the xml file can be longer.

This are to ways I tried it, but I don't get it to work properly:

xmldoc = minidom.parse("/DATA.xml")
Shortcut = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("shortcut")
Label = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("label")
print xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("label")[12].firstChild.nodeValue (works)
for element in Label:
  if  element.getAttributeNode("label") == 'Test':
  # if element.getAttributeNode('label') == "Test":
    print "element found"
else:
    print "element not found"

for node in xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("label"):
    if node.nodeValue == "Test":
        print "element found"
else:
    print "element not found"

@Helfenstein, is `lxml` an option? Using **XPath** seems most reasonable to this solution, if not you need to iterate the node tree and check against the text attribute. I'm not familiar to `minidom` however. — Anzel, Jul 07 '15 at 07:18
I would like not to use extra modules. It should be able to run from 1 program. Otherwise I guess elementree also would work. — Helfenstein, Jul 07 '15 at 07:56

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 07 '15 at 09:54

1

This working example demonstrates one possible way to search element containing specific text using minidom module* :

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString

def getText(nodelist):
    rc = []
    for node in nodelist:
        if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
            rc.append(node.data)
    return ''.join(rc)


xml = """<root>
<shortcut>
<label>33060</label>
<label2>Common Shortcut</label2>
</shortcut>
<shortcut>
<label>Test</label>
</shortcut>
</root>"""
xmldoc = parseString(xml)
labels = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("label")
for label in labels:
    text = getText(label.childNodes)
    if text == "Test":
        print("node found : " + label.toprettyxml())
        break

output :

node found : <label>Test</label>

*) getText() function taken from minidom documentation page.

answered Jul 07 '15 at 09:54

har07

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That starts to look good. How can you get the node number? I will have a look at it tonight. What is the def to return part doing? I am not so familiar with python yet. – Helfenstein Jul 07 '15 at 10:12
`getText()` function return concatenated text of all nodes in the `nodelist` argument. – har07 Jul 07 '15 at 13:42
Perfect! Worked as you stated. – Helfenstein Jul 07 '15 at 18:34

Search for specific text in an element of XML with DOM (Python)

1 Answers1