Geek Answers Handbook

Changing XML while saving layout

What would you use to modify the XML file, preserving as much layout as possible, including indentation and comments?

My problem is that I have several massive manually edited XML files that describe the user interface, and now I need to translate several attributes into another language.

I tried doing this with Python + ElementTree, but it did not save any spaces or comments.

I saw that XSLT is suggested for similar questions, but I don’t think it is an alternative in this case, since I need to do some logic and search for each attribute.

It would be preferable if the order of the attributes in each element is also preserved, but I can tolerate the reordered order.

+4
source share
2 answers

Any DOM manipulation module should suit your needs. A layout is just text data, so it represents text nodes in the DOM:

>>> from xml.dom.minidom import parseString >>> dom = parseString('''\ ... <message> ... <text> ... Hello! ... </text> ... </message>''') >>> dom.childNodes[0].childNodes [<DOM Text node "u'\n '">, <DOM Element: text at 0xb765782c>, <DOM Text node "u'\n'">] >>> text = dom.getElementsByTagName('text')[0].childNodes[0] >>> text.data = text.data.replace(u'Hello', u'Hello world') >>> print dom.toxml() <?xml version="1.0" ?><message> <text> Hello world! </text> </message>
+2
source

If you use an XSLT processor such as xt , you can write extension methods in Java that can perform any arbitrary conversion necessary.

Having said that, I have successfully used Python xml.dom.minidom for this kind of conversion. It saves spaces and layout.

+1
source

More articles:


All Articles