[Michael Williams] > I need it to somehow convert my XML to intuitively referenceable > object. Any ideas? I could even do it myself if I knew the mechanism > by which python classes do this (create variables on the fly).
You seem to already have a fair idea what kind of model you need, and to know that there is a simple way for you to create one. I encourage you to progress on this path: it will increase the depth of your understanding. One mistake I think that some people make about XML is relying on other peoples interpretations of the subject, rather than forming their own opinions. The multitude of document models provided by everyone and his mother all make assumptions about how the components of the model will be accessed, in what order those components will be accessed, how often and when, how memory efficient the model is, etc, etc. To really understand the trade-offs and strengths of all the different models, it is a good exercise to build your own object model. It's a simple exercise, due to pythons highly dynamic nature. Understanding your own model will help you understand what the other models do and do not provide. You can then evaluate other off-the-shelf models for your specific applications: I always find different XML tools suit different situations. See this post of mine from a couple years back about different ways of building your own document/data models. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/e2a4a1c35395ffec I think the reference to the ActiveState recipe will be of particular interest, since you could have a running example very quickly indeed. See also my tutorial post on extracting document content from a SAX stream. I gave the example of a simple stack-based xpath-style expression matcher. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/6853bddbb9326948 Also contained in that thread is an illuminating and productive discussion between the effbot and myself about how wonderfully simple ElementTree makes this, not to mention unbeatably efficient. this-week-i-ave-been-mostly-using-kid-for-templating-ly'yrs, -- alan kennedy ------------------------------------------------------ email alan: http://xhaus.com/contact/alan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
