Generating and parsing an xml documents

From time to time some projects required to manipulate/generate/parse an XML documents. This kind of work was always pain in the ass for me and I was unwilling to do such job. All modules I used to reach XML related goals wasn't too intuitive. Yes, there is xml.etree which is best module for common tasks but is not to much objective.

Thats why I finally pushed myself to develop my own manipulation tool. I think this module is more object-oriented than xml.etree and developer friendly at the same time. "Easyxml" is currently under construction and contains only basic XML generator:

• generating XML document,
• setting basic properties ("version", "encodings").
• creating XML element,
• adding attributes,
• adding sub-elements,
• generating XML document as a string (indentation and separation can be modified),
• writing XML document to file, PIPE and STDOUT.

Things that will be done in the future:

• removing pointed element,
• searching element with "xpath",
• removing elements,
• reorganizing elements order,
• parsing a XML documents,
• refactoring.

Here is an example of use:

 from easyxml import XMLDocument, XMLElement  
   
 document = XMLDocument(root='address_book', encoding='UTF8')  
 usr1 = XMLElement(name='user', attributes={'firstname': 'Wiktor', 'lastname': 'Wrutek'})  
 usr1_addr = XMLElement(name='addres')  
 usr1_street = XMLElement(name='street', body='Dubois')  
 usr1_number = XMLElement(name='number', body='48')  
   
 # add street and home number as an sub-element of address  
 usr1_addr.add_element([usr1_street, usr1_number])  
   
 # add address as an sub-element of user  
 usr1.add_element(usr1_addr)  
   
 # append elements to document  
 # currently there is no special method to do this  
 document.elements.append(usr1)  
   
 # indentation set on 4 spaces  
 print document.string(indent='  ')  

Above will produce following output:

   
 <?xml version="0.1" encoding="UTF8"?>  
 <address_book>  
   <user lastname="'Wrutek'" firstname="'Wiktor'">  
     <addres>  
         <street>  
                 Dubois  
         </street>  
         <number>  
                 48  
         </number>  
     </addres>  
   </user>  
 </address_book>  
   

I've got hope that this will be useful not only for me. I'll try to update this project as often as it is possible.

Hello world

1, 2, 3, testing, testing.

It's time to become visible.