On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:32:50 +0100 Fredrik Lundh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Yes. For sure. I though XSLT was something like XML not other > > "language" and that Python will have any library that uses XSLT to do > > transformation... > XSLT is definitely a language (it's turing complete, after all), but > that there are of course several Python bindings to XSLT libraries; > here's one: XSLT is definitely something like XML - because an XSLT file is an XML file. But it represents a program, and hence is a programming language. It is unlike most other programming languages you will have encountered. XSLT may well be the most popular thing like XSLT, but Prolog is probably the language you've heard of that's closest to it. If you want to transform your XML into different-shaped XML or flat text, XSLT should be high on the list of tools to check out. > http://codespeak.net/lxml/ Very much recommended. > But please don't use SAX if you can avoid it; it's hard to work with, > and not very efficient. I'd recommend ElementTree, which is a light- > weight DOM library, that's part of the standard library: > http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm While I love the ElementTree API, the standard library implementation is missing tools that I find invaluable in working with XML. No schema support, for instance. The effort of maintaining a schema is repaid multiple times if you take advantage of it. If your application validates the XML on input, you *know* that when you translate a required attribute value to an the, the attribute will be there, and the it's value will repersent an int. And using a schema-aware editor is pretty much the only sane way for a human being to edit XML. The XPath implementation is also limited. Having written a little XSLT, not having pretty much all of XPath available for pulling values is painful. And of course, XSLT support, as there are things that XSLT is good for. Others I'm not so sure about. External entities seem to be unsupported by ElementTree. XInclude? More? > > Is this the way you will do it? > > As the author of ElementTree, I'm a bit biased, but I'd definitely do it > in Python ;-) Ditto - well, except I'm not the author of ElementTree. If all you want to do is read the XML into a tree of python strings, then the ElementTree implementation is an excellent API for doing so, and being in the standard library means you should already have it. If you want to leverage XML to make your job as easy as possible, then I'd recommend using the aforementioned lxml instead. It provides the same ElementTree API on top of the popular libxml2 and libxslt libraries (your Unix-like system probably comes with them pre-installed), and hence gives you access to all the XML tools they provide - like the ones I mentioned above. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
