listxml 0.2.0

A simple utility for generating XML from Python

Listxml

Listxml is an unpythonic XML wrangler!

Version: 0.2.0, released 2022 August 20.

Python provides the DOM and ElementTree interfaces for creating an XML tree, and serialising it for output. These work well, but can hardly be called lightweight; it can be wearisome to programmatically assemble an XML document, and because the document is assembled from a multitude of method calls, it's easy to lose the wood amongst the trees.

The Listxml package provides a different way of creating a data structure which can be serialised into XML. That structure might represent an (X)HTML file, or something like an RSS feed. It's easy to generate programmatically, and, because it's compact, you can see more of it on the screen at once.

Rather than be clever about fancy syntax, Listxml aims for minimalism and a homogeneous representation (pssst: if you think this looks a bit lispy, you would not be mistaken).

For example:

import listxml

# l is a list of lists representing elements
l = [['p',                       # the element name is a string
      [['class', 'highlight']],  # attributes are a list of two-element lists
      "Hello, world", 99],       # element content, string or str()-friendly
     ["p", "& another <para>"]]  # no attributes, and escaped content

coll = listxml.Collector()
listxml.list_to_collector(coll, l)

# print the resulting byte content
for content in coll:
    print(content.decode('utf-8'))

# or use it as an iterator
print(b''.join(coll))

Alternatively, use PrintCollector as a collector, to send output to stdout or another stream (list_to_stream does that).

The intention is that, as long as you don't use the b'bytestring' escape mechanism mentioned below, it should be impossible to serialise an invalid XML file using this package.

For symmetry, the package also includes a way of turning XML into the sort of list it expects (wrapping the expat parser built in to Python):

# Given a file containing "<xml>...</xml>"...
l = construct(fn)

A fuller example

This example assembles an HTML page body, and drops it into a ‘template’.

import listxml

def wrap_body(title, body):
    """Create a standard XHTML document (ie, this is a form of templating)"""
    return ['html', [['xmlns', 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml']],
            ['head',
             ['title', title],
             ['link', [['rel', 'stylesheet'],
                       ['type', 'text/css'],
                       ['href', 'http://example.org/mystyle.css']]]],
            ['body',
             ['h1', title],
             *body]]

# assemble a list of li elements
items = ["First item", "Second item"]
ul = [['li', i] for i in items]

# build up a list of body content elements
b = [['p', 'One paragraph'],
     ['p', "Another one, with ",
      ['a', [['href', 'http://example.org/home.html']],
       "a link"]],
     ['ul', *ul]] # append the ul list to make list contents

# use the PrintCollector to send this to stdout
coll = listxml.PrintCollector()
listxml.list_to_collector(coll, wrap_body("My XHTML file", b))

Classes and functions

function list_to_collector(coll, lst)

• coll: a Collector – see below
• lst: a list representation of an XML document

Convert the input list to XML and send it to the collector. See below for the structure of the input list. Returns the input collector.

function list_to_stream(lst, stream=None)

• lst: a list representation of an XML document
• stream: a text stream, such as sys.stdout, the object returned from open(), or an io.StringIO object.

As with list_to_collector, except that the contents are 'collected' to stdout. If the stream argument is present, send the output there instead. This function returns the number of characters written to the stream.

class Collector

Collect strings or bytes, and return them as a iterator. The Collector object is given to the list_to_collector function to accumulate the results of the conversion of the list. The Collector object may subsequently be treated as an iterator, returning a sequence of bytestrings. This may therefore be printed as:

content = [['p', "Hello, world"], ["p", "Another paragraph"]]

coll = listxml.Collector()
listxml.list_to_collector(coll, content)
for bs in coll:
    print(bs.decode('utf-8'), end='')

or write it out as a single bytestring:

with open('output.xml', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(b''.join(coll))

Methods:

• append(s): append something to the collector, which can be a string, a bytestring, or anything str() can work with.
• get_length(): return the length of the contents, in bytes.

class PrintCollector

A Collector-like object which 'collects’ its output and sends it to a stream. The output is sent to sys.stdout, unless an alternative is set with the set_stream() method.

The ‘stream’ must be a text file, such as sys.stdout, the stream returned by the open() function, or an in-memory object such as io.StringIO.

This is not in fact a subclass of Collector, though it has the same interface.

coll = listxml.PrintCollector()
listxml.list_to_collector(coll, content)

Methods: as with Collector, with some adjustments

• append(s): append something to the collector, as with Collector.
• get_length(): returns the number of characters written to the stream.
• set_stream(s): set the stream that is written to.

Or alternatively just use the list_to_stream function:

with open('output.xml', 'w') as f:
    listxml.list_to_stream(content, f)

function construct(file_or_stream, keywords...)

For symmetry, there is also a function to turn an XML input into a list. Given a (string) filename or a text stream containing XML, construct a list representation of the XML.

Keyword arguments:

• attributes_as_dict: If attributes_as_dict is False (default) then attributes are [['name','value'], ...]; if it is True, then attributes are a dict {'name': 'value', ...}.
• omit_empty_attlist: If omit_empty_attlist is False (default) then there is always an attribute element, even when the attribute list is empty (ie, [] or {}); if it is True, then empty attribute lists are suppressed.

This reading function is, in this version, not XML Namespace-aware. Adding that isn't hard, but it's currently unclear how best to represent namespaces in a convenient way, when generating the input list for writing.

Common techniques

Assemble a list:

trs = [['tr', ['td', 'foo']],
       ['tr', ['td', 'bar']]]
table = ['table', *trs]   # wrap an array of elements in a parent element

doc = ['body',
       ['p',
        [['class', 'highlight']],
        "Here is table no.", 1],
       table,
       ['p', "that was ", ['em', "easy"]]]

with open('t.xhtml', 'w') as f:
    listxml.list_to_stream(doc, stream=f)

Part of the point of this library is that in some circumstances it's convenient to generate list content:

elements = ['one', 'two']
trs = [['tr', ['td', e]] for e in elements]

In this context, note the difference between

table1 = ['table', trs]

and

table2 = ['table', *trs]

The first produces

['table', [['tr', ['td', 'one']], ['tr', ['td', 'two']]]]

which is not the structure desired, because this appears to be an attribute tr, with value ['td', 'one'] (this won't produce an error, since the package will (successfully) call str() on the attribute value). In contrast the second version produces

['table', ['tr', ['td', 'one']], ['tr', ['td', 'two']]]

which is correct, and which turns into

<table><tr><td>one</td></tr><tr><td>two</td></tr></table>

Input syntax

The input list consists of a single element representing an XML document, where

element: [STRING, optional-attributes?, item ...]
optional-attributes: [] | [[STRING, stringable], ...] | DICT
item: element | stringable | BYTESTRING

where STRING and BYTESTRING are the Python types, DICT is a (STRING -> stringable) Python dictionary, and stringable is either a string, or something which str() can turn into a string

thus:

['el', 'foo', ...]                                -- an element <el>foo...</el>
['el', [['k1', 'v1'], ['k2', 'v2'], ...]], ...]   -- an element <el k1="v1" k2="v2"...>...</el>
['el', {'k1': 'v1', 'k2': 'v2', ...}, ...]        -- ditto

and the ... may include other such elements. Items which are ‘stringable’ are escaped when being printed. Items which are bytestrings are not; thus it's possible to have b'<div>content</div>' as an item and this will be emitted as-is, even if doing so would produce invalid XML.

The 'coll' object is any object with an append() method, such as the Collector class above.