Python, XML parsing, and Elementtree

Question

What am I screwing up here?

I can't get this to return any results. I'm sure I'm doing something stupid. I'm not a programmer and this is driving me crazy. Trying to learn but after about 8 hours I'm frazzled.

Here is a sample of my XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

-<MyObjectBuilder_Sector xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<!-- Saved '2014-08-23T15:28:07.8585220-05:00' with SEToolbox version '1.44.14.2' -->


-<Position>

<X>0</X>

<Y>0</Y>

<Z>0</Z>

</Position>


-<SectorEvents>


-<Events>


-<MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>


-<DefinitionId>

<TypeId>MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventDefinition</TypeId>

<SubtypeId>SpawnCargoShip</SubtypeId>

</DefinitionId>

<Enabled>false</Enabled>

<ActivationTimeMs>401522</ActivationTimeMs>

</MyObjectBuilder_GlobalEventBase>

</Events>

</SectorEvents>

<AppVersion>1044014</AppVersion>


-<SectorObjects>


-<MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase xsi:type="MyObjectBuilder_VoxelMap">

<EntityId>72248529206701361</EntityId>

<PersistentFlags>CastShadows InScene</PersistentFlags>


-<PositionAndOrientation>

<Position z="-466" y="-8987" x="-95"/>

<Forward z="-1" y="0" x="0"/>

<Up z="0" y="1" x="0"/>

</PositionAndOrientation>

<Filename>BaseAsteroid.vox</Filename>

</MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase>


-<MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase xsi:type="MyObjectBuilder_VoxelMap">

<EntityId>72151252176979970</EntityId>

<PersistentFlags>CastShadows InScene</PersistentFlags>


-<PositionAndOrientation>

<Position z="-11301.9033" y="-1183.70569" x="-2126.84"/>

<Forward z="-1" y="0" x="0"/>

<Up z="0" y="1" x="0"/>

</PositionAndOrientation>

<Filename>asteroid0.vox</Filename>

</MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase>


-<MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase xsi:type="MyObjectBuilder_VoxelMap">

<EntityId>72108197145016458</EntityId>

<PersistentFlags>CastShadows InScene</PersistentFlags>


-<PositionAndOrientation>

<Position z="355.7873" y="18738.05" x="1064.912"/>

<Forward z="-1" y="0" x="0"/>

<Up z="0" y="1" x="0"/>

</PositionAndOrientation>

<Filename>asteroid1.vox</Filename>

</MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase>

Here is my code, it just never finds anything...:(

from xml.etree import cElementTree as ElementTree

    ElementTree.register_namespace('xsi', 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLScheme-instance')
    namespace = {'xsi': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLScheme-instance'} 

    xmlPath = 'e:\\test.xml'
    xmlRoot = ElementTree.parse(xmlPath).getroot()

    #why this no return anything
    results = xmlRoot.findall(".//SectorObjects/MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase[@xsi:type='MyObjectBuilder_VoxelMap']", namespaces=namespace)
    print(results)

Answer 1

Your question is 'What am I screwing up here?' First of all your XML itself has issues and seems you cannot get it to paste here right. I did few things to make it workable.

1) Added lines below since they were not there in the XML:

</SectorObjects>
</MyObjectBuilder_Sector>

2) The findall function doesn't take a named argument 'namespaces' and the xsi part also gave an error (SyntaxError: prefix 'xsi' not found in prefix map). So I changed the call to:

results = xmlRoot.findall(".//SectorObjects/MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase")

When I ran the code with above changes, I got this output below:

[<Element 'MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase' at 0x025028A8>, <Element 'MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase' at 0x02502CC8>, <Element 'MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase' at 0x02502E18>]

If you want to do more with these like getting the value of EntityId, you can do this:

results = xmlRoot.findall(".//SectorObjects/MyObjectBuilder_EntityBase")
try:
    for result in results:
        print result.find('EntityId').text
except AttributeError as aE:
    print str(aE)

Output:

72248529206701361
72151252176979970
72108197145016458