xml7shi 0.1.0

Simple XML parser without tag structure validation

xml7shi

A pull-based simple and permissive XML parser for Python.

Features

• Focuses on practical parsing rather than strict XML specification compliance
• No external dependencies

Installation

pip install xml7shi

Usage

import xml7shi

# Parse XML string
xml = '''<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
  <item id="1">First item</item>
  <item id="2">Second item</item>
</root>'''

# Create reader instance
xr = xml7shi.reader(xml)

# Iterate through each 'item' element
for _ in xr.each("item"):
    id = xr["id"]
    # Read the content of the current element
    if xr.read():
        print(f"ID: {id}, Content: {xr.text}")

Notes:

• The reader instance xr is stateful; its internal state changes with each read operation

API Reference

xml7shi.reader: Main parser class that reads XML content.

Methods:

• read(): Read next element
• find(tag, **kwargs): Find next element matching tag and attributes
• each(tag="", **kwargs): Returns a generator that iterates over elements matching the tag and attributes

Notes:

• kwargs is a dictionary of attribute names and values to match in the element. For example, find("item", id="1") will find the next <item> element with matching attributes

Specifications

For detailed behavior, please refer to examples/tag.py.

Parser Behavior:

• The parser is permissive and does not perform strict XML syntax checking
• The parser attempts to parse incomplete XML as much as possible

Tag Processing:

• Self-closing tags like <tag/> are treated as separate opening and closing tags, i.e., <tag></tag>.
• Tag names are converted to lowercase (case-insensitive)
• Tag hierarchy is not recognized; nested tags must be processed by the user

Attribute Handling:

• Attribute values can be processed with or without quotes (e.g., both a=3 and a="3" are valid)
• Spaces between attribute names and values are allowed (e.g., a = 3)
• All attribute values are treated as strings

Content Processing:

• Text content is decoded using html.unescape() to handle HTML entities
• Comments are stored in the values dictionary with the comment key
• Comment tags are treated as empty tag names

Developer Notes

For developers, it is recommended to use pypa/build and pypa/installer for building and installing this package.

Building:

pip install build
python -m build

This will generate wheel and source distribution files in the dist directory.

Installing:

pip install installer
python -m installer dist/*.whl

Alternatively, you can use pip to install the wheel file directly:

pip install dist/*.whl

Using these standard tools ensures a more reliable and reproducible build and installation process.