About

XML can be converted to a data structure (such as JSON) and back. For example:

<employees>
    <person>
        <name value="Alice"/>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name value="Bob"/>
    </person>
</employees>

can be converted into this data structure (which also a valid JSON object):

{ "employees": [
    { "person": {
        "name": {"@value": "Alice"}
    } },
    { "person": {
        "name": {"@value": "Alice"}
    } }
] }

This uses the BadgerFish convention that prefixes attributes with @. Other conventions supported by this library are:

• BadgerFish: Use "$" for text content, @ to prefix attributes,

• GData: Use "$t" for text content, ignore attributes

• Parker: Ignore attributes and text content

Convert data to XML

To convert from a data structure to XML using the BadgerFish convention:

>>> from xmljson import badgerfish as bf
>>> bf.etree({'p': {'@id': 'main', '$': 'Hello', 'b': {'$': 'bold'}}})

This returns an array of etree.Element structures. In this case, the result is identical to:

>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import fromstring
>>> [fromstring('<p id="main">Hello<b>bold</b></p>')]

The result can be inserted into any existing root etree.Element:

>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, tostring
>>> root = Element('root')
>>> result = bf.etree({'p': {'@id': 'main'}}, root=root)
>>> tostring(result)
'<root><p id="main"/></root>'

This includes lxml.html as well:

>>> from lxml.html import Element, tostring
>>> root = Element('html')
>>> result = bf.etree({'p': {'@id': 'main'}}, root=root)
>>> tostring(result, doctype='<!DOCTYPE html>')
'<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html><p id="main"></p></html>'

Convert XML to data

To convert from XML to a data structure using the BadgerFish convention:

>>> bf.data(fromstring('<p id="main">Hello<b>bold</b></p>'))
{"p": {"$": "Hello", "@id": "main", "b": {"$": "bold"}}}

To convert this to JSON, use:

>>> from json import dumps
>>> dumps(bf.data(fromstring('<p id="main">Hello<b>bold</b></p>')))
'{"p": {"b": {"$": "bold"}, "@id": "main", "$": "Hello"}}'

To preserve the order of attributes and children, specify the dict_type as OrderedDict (or any other dictionary-like type) in the constructor:

>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> from xmljson import BadgerFish              # import the class
>>> bf = BadgerFish(dict_type=OrderedDict)      # pick dict class

Conventions

To use a different conversion method, replace BadgerFish with one of the other classes. Currently, these are supported:

>>> from xmljson import badgerfish      # == xmljson.BadgerFish()
>>> from xmljson import gdata           # == xmljson.GData()
>>> from xmljson import parker          # == xmljson.Parker()

Installation

This is a pure-Python package built for Python 2.6+ and Python 3.0+. To set up:

pip install xmljson

Roadmap

• Test cases for Unicode

• Support for namespaces and namespace prefixes

History