Python & XML

Basic DOM Operations

This section goes over different techniques for working with DOM, and highlights some of the features that MSXML supports but PyXML does not. In addition to these convenience functions added by Microsoft, working with MSXML means also working with COM, so examples are shown here to work with the various types returned by MSXML that may stray from your standard Python list types and tuples.

The Microsoft DOM supports the same operations as the PyXML DOM, but there are differences in using them. For starters, MSXML is only accessible via COM, so your Python needs to work as a COM client. Second, and related to the first, is MSXML is not a native Python implementation and therefore doesn’t use Python types like the lists and tuples you’d find in PyXML. This section shows you the basics of working with this foreign parser from within Python.

To illustrate some node and document manipulation, you need some source XML to manipulate. You’ll want structured data like books.xml shown in Example E-1, and try out your MSXML skills.

Example E-1. books.xml

<book name="Python and XML">
  <section name="Appendix E" type="Appendix">
    <chapterTitle>Appendix E</chapterTitle>
    <bodytext>This appendix focuses on techniques for using...
    </bodytext>
  </section>
</book>

Using MSXML, it’s easy to take this document apart. But before you can work with MSXML, you have to import the correct library to access COM objects (win32com.client). Additionally, for the call to Dispatch, you need the ProgID ...