New User questions...

[KeithProctor]

Love that you created this tool so TY up front. I'm having the following issues:

1. How do you not add the # and @ characters being prepended to the name of a name value pair?
2. Is there a way to efficiently deal with paths? I want to do something like this.

I know this is invalid... Just showing a concept here:

`basePath = ['FMSaveAsXML']
structPath = [basePath]['Structure']
layPath = structPath['LayoutCatalog'] # want an iterable pointer to this location

print ( 'Ver: ' + str(basePath['@Version']))
print ( 'layout: ' + str(layPath[0]['LayoutName']))
`

[KeithProctor]

@martinblech I've created a function to walk over a list. The call simplifies things but I consider the function itself a hack. It's ~30 lines long. So I do something like:

GetXMLData( xml, basePath + ['path2', 'path3'])

So the real question now is... is there a better way?

[bfontaine]

Please share a sample XML so we can reproduce your issue.

[KeithProctor]

It's just standard XML. I'm asking is there a better way to request a path into the dictionary items. Say I want this path /path1/path2/path3/someField Python doesn't allow path = /path1/path2/path3/someField theDict[path] or path = /path1/path2/path3/ theDict.getLocation(path) The desire here is to simply my code and either get the field or XML block at those locations. If I know I'll be inside a block for a while this can speed up my code and simplify usage as well as make the code more readable. In short... Is there another way to make the request. Does your package offer up another method?

…

On Jul 7, 2023, at 9:26 AM, Baptiste Fontaine ***@***.***> wrote: Please share a sample XML so we can reproduce your issue.

[bfontaine]

(I’m just another user of xmltodict, I’m not the maintainer)

If your XML contains only a single field of each tag, you could use theDict["path1"]["path2"]["path3"]. If it doesn’t or you don’t know in advance, it becomes tricky because each intermediate element can be either be a dict or a list of dicts.

As far as I know, xmltodict just parses the XML into a dict; it doesn’t offer any way to traverse that dict. There are other libraries that offer that kind of feature (lxml is probably the most popular) but if you already use xmltodict it might be overkill to change libraries just for that. If you search for "nested dict" on StackOverflow you might be able to find a suitable solution (see here for example).

[KeithProctor]

kk TY for the response. I like that page but I'm also looking for a response to that last example. key = ("a", "b", "c") The objective now is to create some function that works as follows:

>> getitem(d, key)

0 This format can also conveniently be applied directly as the __getitem__ method of a class. One more constraint: I want the function to fail noisily when it is asked to get a non-existing key. Not throwing an exception but returning standard errors like invalid key. I'll keep looking TY.

…

On Jul 7, 2023, at 1:36 PM, Baptiste Fontaine ***@***.***> wrote: If you search for "nested dict" on StackOverflow you might be able to find a suitable solution