XML Processing with Python: Part Six

June 19, 2015 by Leave a Comment

XML ProcessingDOM (Document Object Model)

At the heart of DOM lies the Document object. This is a tree-based representation of the XML document. Tree-based models are a natural fit for XML’s hierarchical structure, making this a very intuitive way of working with XML. Each element in the tree is called a Node object, and it may have attributes, child nodes, text, and so forth, all of which are also objects that are stored in the tree. DOM objects have a number of methods for creating and adding nodes, for finding nodes of a specific type or name, and for reordering or deleting nodes.

Differences between SAX and DOM

The major difference between SAX and DOM is DOM’s ability to store the entire document in memory and manipulate and search it as a tree, rather than force you to parse the document repeatedly, or force you to build your own in-memory representation of the document. The document is parsed once, and then nodes can be added, removed, or changed in memory and then written back out to a file when the program is finished.

Although either SAX or DOM can do almost anything you might want to do with XML, you might want to use one over the other in certain circumstances. For instance, if you are working on an application in which you will be modifying an XML document repeatedly based on user input, you might want the convenient random access capabilities for DOM. but if you are building an application that needs to process a stream of XML quickly with minimal overhead, SAX might be a better choice for you.

DOM is designed with random access in mind. It provides a tree that can be manipulated at runtime and needs to be loaded into memory only once. SAX is stream-based, so data comes in as a stream one character after the next, but the document isn’t seen in its entirety before it starts getting processed; therefore, if you want to randomly access data, you have to either build a partial tree of the document in memory based on document events, or reparse the document every time you want a different piece of data.

Most people find the object-oriented behavior of DOM very intuitive and easy to learn. The event-driven model of SAX is more similar to functional programming and can be more challenging to get up to speed on.

If you are working in a memory-limited environment, DOM is probably not a good choice. Even on a fairly high-end system, constructing a DOM tree for a large document (say 2-3 MB) can bring the computer to a halt while it processes. Because SAX treats the document as a stream, it never loads the whole document into memory, so it is preferable if you are memory constrained or working with very large documents.

Using DOM requires a great deal of processing time while the document tree is being built, but once the tree is built, DOM allows for much faster searching and manipulation of nodes because the entire document is in memory. SAX is somewhat fast for searching documents, but not as efficient for their manipulation. However, for document transformations, SAX is considered to be the parser of choice because the event-driven model is fast and very compatible with how XSLT works.

In the next article, we’ll look at SAX and DOM parsers for Python.

External Links:

XML DOM Parser at W3Schools

Document Object Model at Wikipedia

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XML Processing with Python: Part Five

June 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment

XML processingWhen parsing XML, you have your choice of two different types of parsers: SAX and DOM. SAX stands for the Simple API for XML. It was originally only implemented for Java, and was added to Python as of version 2.0. It is a stream-based, event-driven parser. The events are known as document events, and a document event might be one of several things; the start of an element, the end of an element, encountering a text node, or encountering a comment. For example, the following document:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<team>
<name>New York Mets</name>
</team>

might fire the following events:

   start document
   start element: team
   start element: name
   characters: New York Mets
   end element: name
   end element: team
   end document

Whenever a document event occurs, the parser fires an event for the calling application to handle. More precisely, it fires an event for the calling application’s Content Handler object to handle. Content Handlers are objects that implement a known interface specified by the SAX API from which the parser can call methods.

When parsing a document with SAX, the document is read and parsed in the order in which it appears. The parser opens the file or another datasource as a stream of data (so it doesn’t have to do it all at once) and then fires events whenever an element is encountered. Because the parser does not wait for the whole document to load before beginning parsing, SAX can parse documents soon after it begins reading the document. Because SAX does not read the whole document before it begins processing, however, it may process a partial document before discovering it is badly formed. As a result, SAX-based applications should implement their own error-checking.

When working with SAX, document events are handled by event handlers. You declare callback functions for specific types of document events, which are then passed to the parser and called when a document event occurs that matches the callback function.

In the next article, we will introduce DOM, and the pros and cons of using SAX or DOM, as well as a discussion of available parsers.

External Links:

SAX on Wikipedia

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XML Processing with Python: Part Four

June 5, 2015 by Leave a Comment

XML ProcessingXML is similar in structure and form to HTML. This is not entirely an accidental thing. XML and HTML both originated from SGML and share a number of syntactic features. The earlier versions of HTML are not directly compatible with XML, though, because XML requires that every tag be closed, and certain HTML tags don’t require a closing tag (such as <br> and <img>). However, the W3C has declared the XHTML schema in an attempt to bring the two standards in line with each other. XHTML can be manipulated using the same sets of tools as pure XML. However, Python also comes with specialized libraries designed specifically for dealing with HTML.

The HTMLParser class, unlike the htmllib class, is not based on an SGML parser and can be used for both XHTML and earlier versions of HTML. To try using the HTMLParser class, create a sample HTML file named headings.html that contains at least one h1 tag. Then save the file to your Python directory and run the following code:

from html.parser import HTMLParser
class HeadingParser(HTMLParser):
    inHeading = False
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "h1":
            self.inHeading = True
            print("Found a Heading 1")
    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.inHeading:
            print(data)
    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag == "h1":
            self.inHeading = False
hParser = HeadingParser()
file = open("headings.html", "r")
html = file.read()
file.close()
hParser.feed(html)

The HTMLParser class defines methods, which are called when the parser finds certain types of content, such as a beginning tag, an end tag, or a processing instruction. By default, these methods do nothing. To parse an HTML document, a class that inherits from HTMLParser and implements the necessary methods must be created. After a parse class has been created and instantiated, the parser is fed data using the feed method. Data can be fed to it one line at a time or all at once.

This example class only handles tags of type <h1>. When an HTMLParser encounters a tag, the handle_starttag method is called, and the tag name and any attached attributes are passed to it.

The handle_starttag method determines whether the tag is an <h1>. If so, it prints a message saying it has encountered an h1 and sets a flag indicating that it is currently an <h1>. If text data is found, the handle_data function is called, which determines whether it is an <h1>, based on the flag. If the flag is true, the method prints the text data. If a closing tag is encountered, the handle_endtag method is called, which determines whether the tag that was just closed was an <h1>. If so, it prints a message, and then sets the flag to false.

External Links:

HTMLParser at docs.python.org

Using the Python HTMLParser library

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XML Processing with Python: Part Three

May 26, 2015 by Leave a Comment

XML ProcessingIn the previous article, we discussed the Document Type Definition (DTD) language. In this article, we will discuss Schema and XPath.

XML Processing with Python: Schema

Schema was designed to address some of the limitations of DTDs and provide a more sophisticated XML-based language for describing document models. It enables you to cleanly specify numeric models for content, describe character data patterns using regular expressions, and express content models such as sequences, choices, and unrestricted models.

If you wanted to translate the hypothetical library model into a schema with the same information contained in the DTD, you would wind up with something like the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/20001/XMLSchema">
<xs:element name="mlb">
   <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
         <xs:element name="team" maxOccurs="unbounded">
            <xs:complexType>
               <xs:sequence>
                  <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string"/>
                  <xs:element name="generalmanager" type="xs:string" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
               </xs:sequence>
            </xs:complexType>
         </xs:element>
      </xs:sequence>
   <xs:attribute name="owner" type="xs:string" use="required"/>
   </xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>

This expresses exactly the same data model as the DTD, but some differences are immediately apparent.

To begin with, the document’s top-level node contains a namespace declaration, specifying that all tags starting with xs: belong to the namespace identified by the URL “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema“. For practical purposes, this means that you now have a document model that you can validate your schema against, using the same tools you would use to validate any other XML document.

Next, notice that the preceding document has a hierarchy very similar to the document it is describing. Rather than create individual elements and link them together using references, the document model mimics the structure of the document as closely as possible. You can also create global elements and then reference them in a structure, but you are not required to use references; they are optional. This creates are more intuitive structure for visualizing the form of possible documents that can be created from this model.

Finally, schemas support attributes such as maxOccurs, which will take either a numeric value from 1 to infinity or the value unbounded, which expresses that any number of that element or grouping may occur. Although this schema doesn’t illustrate it, schemas can express that an element matches a specific regular expression, using the pattern attribute, and schemas can express more flexible content models by mixing the choice and sequence content models.

XML Processing with Python: XPath

XPath is a language for describing locations and node sets within an XML document. An XPath expression contains a description of a pattern that a node must match. If the node matches, it is selected; otherwise, it is ignored. Patterns are composed of a series of steps, either relative to a context node or absolutely defined from the document root. An absolute path begins with a slash, a relative one does not, and each step is separated by a slash.

A step contains three parts: an axis that describes the direction to travel, a node test to select nodes along that axis, and optional predicates, which are Boolean tests that a node must meet. An example step might be ancestor-or-self::team[1], where ancestor-or-self is the axis to move along, team is the node test, and [1] is a predicate specifying to select the first node that meets all the other conditions. If the axis is omitted, it is assumed to refer to the child axis for the current node, so mlb/team[1]/name[1] would select the name of the first team in the MLB database.

A node test can be a function as well as a node name. For instance, team/node() will return all nodes below the selected team node, regardless of whether they are text or elements.

The following table describes a handful of shortcuts for axes:

 

Shortcut Meaning
@ Specifies the attribute axis. This is an abbreviation for attribute::.
*
// Specifies any descendant of the current node. This is an abbreviation for descendant-or-self::*//. If used at the beginning of an XPath, it matches elements anywhere in the document.

External Links:

More info on Schema

More info on XPath

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XML Processing with Python: Part One

May 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment

XML processingExtensible Markup Language, or XML, is a powerful, open standards-based method of data storage. The vocabulary of XML is infinitely customizable to fit whatever kind of data you want to store. Its format makes it human readable, while remaining easy to parse for programs. It encourages semantic markup, rather than formatting-based markup, separating content and presentation from each other, so that a single piece of data can be repurposed many times and displayed in many ways.

XML Processing: A Simple Hierarchical Markup Language

At the core of XML is a simple hierarchical markup language. Tags are used to mark off sections of content with different semantic meanings, and attributes are used to add metadata about the content.

Here is an example of a simple XML document that could be used to describe different baseball teams:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<mlb>
<team>
<name>New York Mets</name>
<generalmanager>Sandy Alderson</generalmanager>
</team>
<team>
<name>Washington Nationals</name>
<generalmanager>Mike Rizzo</generalmanager>
</team>
<team>
<name>Atlanta Braves</name>
<generalmanager>John Hart</generalmanager>
</team>
</mlb>

Notice that every piece of data is wrapped in a tag and that tags are nested in a hierarchy that contains further information about the data it wraps. You probably guessed that <generalmanager> is a child piece of information for <team>, as is <name>.

Unlike semantic markup languages like LaTeX, every piece of data in XML must be enclosed in tags. The top-level tag is known as the document root, which encloses everything in the document. an XML document can have only one document root.

Just before the document root is the XML declaration: <?xml version=”1.0″?>. This mandatory element lets the processor know that this is an XML document. As of this writing, there are two versions of XML: 1.0 (last updated in 2008) and 1.1 (last updated in 2006). Because version 1.1 is not fully supported yet, for our examples we will be concentrating on version 1.0.

One problem with semantic markup is the possibility for confusion as data changes contexts. For instance, you might want to have a list of teams in a database about baseball. However, without a human to look at it, the database has no way of knowing that <team> means a baseball team, as opposed to, for example, a football team. This is where namespaces come in. A namespace is used to provide a frame of reference for tags and is given a unique ID in the form of a URL, plus a prefix to apply to tags from that namespace. For example, you might create an baseball namespace, with an identifier of http://server.domain.tld/NameSpaces/Baseball and with a prefix of mlb: and use that to provide a frame of reference for the tags. With a namespace, the document would look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<mlb:baseball
xmlns:mlb=”http://server.domain.tld/NameSpaces/Baseball”>
<mlb:team>
<mlb:name>New York Mets</mlb:name>
<mlb:generalmanager>Sandy Alderson</generalmanager>
</mlb:team>
<mlb:team>
<mlb:name>Washington Nationals</name>
<generalmanager>Mike Rizzo</mlb:generalmanager>
</mlb:team>
<mlb:team>
<mlb:name>Atlanta Braves</mlb:name>
<mlb:generalmanager>John Hart</mlb:generalmanager>
</mlb:team>
</mlb:baseball>

It’s now explicit that the team element comes from a set of elements defined by a baseball namespace, and can be treated accordingly.

A namespace declaration can be added to any node in a document, and that namespace will be available to every descendant node of that node. In most documents, all namespace declarations are applied to the root element of the document, even if the namespace is not used until deeper in the document. In this case, the namespace is applied to every tag in the document, so the namespace declaration must be on the root element.

A document can have and use multiple namespaces. For instance, the preceding example library might use one namespace for library information and a second one to add publisher information.

Notice the xmlns: prefix for the the namespace declaration. Certain namespace prefixes are reserved for use by XML and its associated languages, such as xml:, xsl:, and xmlns:. A namespace declaration can be added to any node in a document, and that namespace will be available to every descendant node of that node.

External Links:

XML at Wikipedia

W3 XML home page

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