遍历XML元素列表的属性的Pythonic方法？

Question

I have xml data that looks like this:

<person name="kyle" favoritefood="ham" favoritesport="baseball" />
<person name="sarah" favoritefood="chicken" favoritesport="basketball" />
<person name="susan" favoritefood="tuna" favoritesport="soccer" />

There's no nesting, I'm only interested in those attributes name , favoritefood , and favoritesport .

I'm wondering what the most pythonic way to do this is.

One idea I had was

people = ET.parse('file.txt').getroot().findall('person')
for person in people:
    name = person.get('name')
    favoritefood = person.get('favoritefood')
    favoritesport = person.get('favoritesport')
    ...

But that requires a lot of unnecessary lines of code just for getting the attributes. It seems redundant since I'm typing all the attributes out twice.

Another idea was

people = ET.parse('file.txt').getroot().findall('person')
for name, favoritefood, favoritesport in [(person.get('name'), person.get('favoritefood'), person.get('favoritesport')) for person in people]:
    ...

But as you can see that line's really long, and will get even longer if I wanted to tag an if filter to the end of that list comprehension.

Is there a more pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

I did not challenge naming convention as then my sample could be misleading. But this is my vote

But my focus would be using a context manager to load the file and then apply then methods then

with ET.parse('file.txt').getroot().findall('person') as people:
    [...]

So now, we go to the inner method.

The first version is longer, but more readable to new programmers. The second one uses list comprehension ans therefore shorter. I would go for the second option using list comprehension. I would make sure that the line length does not exceed 100 chars and break it.

Answer 2

You can create a tuple of attributes you are interested in, and then have a dict comprehension inside a list comprehension. This way you don't repeat yourself and the code is short and concise (albeit may be harder for a novice to grasp).

required_attributes = ('name', 'favoritefood', 'favoritesport')
list_of_people = [{attribute: person.get(attribute) for attribute in required_attributes} 
                  for person in persons]

print(list_of_people)
# [{'name': 'kyle', 'favoritefood': 'ham', 'favoritesport': 'baseball'},
#  {'name': 'sarah', 'favoritefood': 'chicken', 'favoritesport': 'basketball'}, 
#  {'name': 'susan', 'favoritefood': 'tuna', 'favoritesport': 'soccer'}]