Chapter 23. Structured Text: XML
XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, is a widely used data interchange format. On top of XML itself, the XML community (in good part within the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C) has standardized many other technologies, such as schema languages, namespaces, XPath, XLink, XPointer, and XSLT.
Industry consortia have additionally defined industry-specific markup languages on top of XML for data exchange among applications in their respective fields. XML, XML-based markup languages, and other XML-related technologies are often used for inter-application, cross-language, cross-platform data interchange in specific fields.
Python’s standard library, for historical reasons, has multiple modules supporting XML under the xml package, with overlapping functionality; this book does not cover them all, but interested readers can find details in the online documentation.
This book (and, specifically, this chapter) covers only the most Pythonic approach to XML processing: ElementTree, created by the deeply missed Fredrik Lundh, best known as “the effbot.”1 Its elegance, speed, generality, multiple implementations, and Pythonic architecture make this the package of choice for Python XML applications. For tutorials and complete details on the xml.etree.ElementTree module beyond what this chapter provides, see the online docs. This book takes for granted some elementary knowledge of XML itself; if you need to learn more about XML, we recommend XML in a Nutshell ...
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