Overview

Wouldn’t it be nice to use dot notation for ElementTrees? This package allows for:

tree = ET.fromstring('<root><a><b c="asdf" /></a></root>')
a = tree.a
b = a.b
b.attrib['c'] == "asdf" # True

tree.a will be a `Element <https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.Element>`__ with the extra `__getattr__ <https://github.com/arve0/objectifiedetree/blob/master/objectifiedetree/__init__.py#L11-12>`__ method. This means that you can use the element as you would do normally, but names in your XML that crases with python’s methods or attributes must be accessed through tree.find(xpath).

This package uses the python implementation of etree, which makes it slower than etree found in CPython. An alternative would be to monkey-patch the built-in with forbiddenfruit, but I haven’t looked into this.

objectifiedetree has copied the python implementation of etree from CPython 3.4 Lib/xml/etree and will probably only work with Python 3.4.

Installation

Install using pip…

pip install objectifiedetree

Example

from objectifiedetree import *

tree = ET.parse('/path/to/file.xml')
# dot notation :-)
el = tree.xpath.to.your.element

# use normal etree attributes
print(el.attrib)

# access name crashes
attrib_el = el.find('./attrib')

Development

Install dependencies and link development version of objectifiedetree to pip:

git clone https://github.com/arve0/objectifiedetree
cd objectifiedetree
pip install -r requirements.txt # install dependencies and objectifiedetree-package

tox

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
make docs