NOTE: Some people think that MiniDOM is a slow and very memory hungry DOM implementation. According to these people, if you are looking for a fast, memory efficient and simple to use tool for working with XML, try ElementTree instead (in the xml.etree package), or use the external lxml implementation.
Some notes on how to use xml.dom.minidom:
Examples of Use
- node.nodeName
- node.nodeValue
- node.childNodes
Find Elements
You can manually walk through the childNodes tree, comparing nodeNames.
You might be able to use getElementsByTagName as well:
getElementsByTagName finds all children of a given name, no matter how deep, thus working recursively. This is usually good, but can cause problems if similar nodes exist at multiple levels and the intervening nodes are important.
Add an Element
Create & add an XML element (Something like <foo />) to an XML document.
Add an Element with Text Inside
Create & add an XML element to an XML document, the element has text inside.
ex: <foo>hello, world!</foo>
1 from xml.dom.minidom import parse
2 dom = parse("bar.xml")
3 x = dom.createElement("foo") # creates <foo />
4 txt = dom.createTextNode("hello, world!") # creates "hello, world!"
5 x.appendChild(txt) # results in <foo>hello, world!</foo>
6 dom.childNodes[1].appendChild(x) # appends at end of 1st child's children
7 print dom.toxml()
Import a Node
You can use DOM 2 "importNode" to take part of one XML document, and put it into another XML document.
Links
Python Library Reference, xml.dom.minidom -- API documentation
Dive into Python, Chapter 5 -- works almost entirely out of the minidom API