Python in a Nutshell

Name

parseString

Synopsis

parseString(string,parser=None)

Like parse, except that string is the XML document in string form.

xml.dom.minidom also supplies many classes as specified by the XML DOM standard. Almost all of these classes subclass Node. Class Node supplies the methods and attributes that all kinds of nodes have in common. A notable class of module xml.dom.minidom that is not a subclass of Node is AttributeList, identified in the DOM standard as NamedNodeMap, which is a mapping that collects the attributes of a node of class Element.

For methods and attributes related to changing and creating XML documents, see Section 23.4 later in this chapter. Here, I present the classes, methods, and attributes that you use most often when traversing a DOM tree without changes, normally after the tree has been built by parsing an XML document. For concreteness and simplicity, I mention Python classes. However, the DOM specifications deal strictly with abstract interfaces, never with concrete classes. Your code must never deal with the class objects directly, only with instances of those classes. Do not type-test nodes (for example, don’t use isinstance on them) and do not instantiate node classes directly (rather, use the factory methods covered later in Section 23.4). This is good Python practice in general, but it’s particularly important here.