Saxaphone

What is saxophone?

Saxaphone is a fast xml parser built on sax in the vein of xpath, but with an easy to use query interface (think minidom or jquery).

What it isn't

Saxaphone isn't recommended as your general-purpose XML parser. It's good for quickly extracting small bits of data from a large xml document.

Compatibility

Saxophone is tested against Python 2.7 and 3.5

Basic Usage

Saxaphone has selectors much like jQuery. To select all of the table tags in a document you can do the following:

from saxophone import Parser

with open(path) as fp:
    table = Parser(document).name("table").parse()

Or select by attribute:

parser.attr("id", "my-table").parse()

Since id is a special attribute, it has it's own rule. Also, elements can be grabbed contextually. To get all the rows in a table:

parser.id("my-table").name("tr").parse()

To save the table element as well, use 'save':

parser.id("my-table").save().name('tr').parse()

Multiple Rule Chains

A parser can have multiple rules

parser.new("table").id("my-table")
parser.new("rows").id("my-table").name("tr")
results = parser.parse()

print results["table"]
> [{"name": "table"...
print results["rows"]
> [{"name": "tr"...

Rule Types

parser.name - Match by tag name
parser.id(id) - Match by id
parser.attr(key, value) - Match by attribute & attribute value
parser.hasattr(key) - Match tags that have an attribute
parser.regex_attr - Match attribute and value by regular expression
parser.combine - Combine multiple rules