README: A Python interface to xmlsq

The utility xmlsq performs simple and full XPath 1.0 queries on an XML document.

>>> import xmlsq
>>> xml = r"<a><b foo='baz'>hello</b><b>world</b><e /></a>"
>>> xmlsq.get_text(xml, "//b")
'hello'
>>> xmlsq.get_text(xml, "//b[2]")
'world'
>>> xmlsq.full_query(xml, "//b")
'<b foo="baz">hello</b>\n<b>world</b>\n'
>>> xmlsq.get_text(xml, "//b/@foo")
'baz'
>>> xmlsq.full_query(xml, "//b/@foo")
'foo="baz"\n'
>>> xmlsq.full_query(xml, "/a", xmlsq.Opts.RAW)
'<a><b foo="baz">hello</b><b>world</b><e/></a>'
>>> xmlsq.count(xml, "//b")
2
>>> xmlsq.count(xml, "//notthere")
0
>>> xmlsq.count(xml, "//e")
1
>>> xmlsq.full_query(xml, "2+3.5")
'5.500000'

xmlsq.get_text() extracts the text value of the first node found selected by the query.

xmlsq.full_query() outputs the result of the full XPath 1.0 query as a string.

xmlsq.count() computes the integer value of count(query).

For xmlsq.get_text() and xmlsq.count() the query must evaluate to a node. xmlsq.full_query() accepts any valid XPath 1.0 expression and returns the result as a string.

For full details of all available methods and options, please see the documentation.