Hi, trying to parse an XML with Beautifulsoup, but hit a brick wall when trying to use
the "recursive" attribute with findall()
I have a pretty odd xml format shown below:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<catalog>
<book id="bk101">
<author>Gambardella, Matthew</author>
<title>XML Developer's Guide</title>
<genre>Computer</genre>
<price>44.95</price>
<publish_date>2000-10-01</publish_date>
<description>An in-depth look at creating applications
with XML.</description>
<catalog>true</catalog>
</book>
<book id="bk102">
<author>Ralls, Kim</author>
<title>Midnight Rain</title>
<genre>Fantasy</genre>
<price>5.95</price>
<publish_date>2000-12-16</publish_date>
<description>A former architect battles corporate zombies,
an evil sorceress, and her own childhood to become queen
of
the world.</description>
<catalog>false</catalog>
</book>
</catalog>
As you can see,
the catalog tag repeats inside
the book tag, which causes an error when I try to to
something like:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup as BSS
catalog = "catalog.xml"
def open_rss():
f = open(catalog, 'r')
return f.read()
def rss_parser():
rss_contents = open_rss()
soup = BSS(rss_contents)
items = soup.findAll('catalog', recursive=False)
for item in items:
print item.title.string
rss_parser()
As you will see, on my soup.findAll I've added recursive=false, which in theory would make it no recurse through
the item found, but skip to
the next one.
This doesn't seem to work, as I always get
the following error:
File "catalog.py", line 17, in rss_parser
print item.title.string
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'string'
I'm sure I'm doing
something stupid here, and would appreciate if someone could give me some help on how to solve this problem.
Changing
the HTML structure is not an option, this this code needs to perform well as it will potentially parse a large XML file.
Thanks in advance,
Marcos
