xmltramp was originally created by Aaron Swartz for simple-yet-powerful parsing of RSS and other xml files.
It is a simple, fast, lightweight alternative to more heavyweight parsers such as BeautifulSoup or ElementTree. It won't do all they do, but what it does do it does simply and easily.
It has been substantially rewritten for subsequent python versions, including Python3 compatibility. Tests are included.
The easiest way is via pip:
pip install xmltramp2
Usage is unchanged from older versions of xmltramp, other than you now import from a package:
from xmltramp2 import xmltramp
Everyone's got their data in XML these days. You need to read it. You've looked at the other XML APIs and they all contain miles of crud that's only necessary when parsing the most arcane documents. Wouldn't it be nice to have an easy-to-use API for the normal XML documents you deal with? That's xmltramp:
>>> sample_xml = """<doc version="2.7182818284590451"
xmlns="http://example.org/bar"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:bbc="http://example.org/bbc">
<author><name>John Polk</name> and <name>John Palfrey</name></author>
<dc:creator>John Polk</dc:creator>
<dc:creator>John Palfrey</dc:creator>
<bbc:show bbc:station="4">Buffy</bbc:show>
</doc>"""
>>> import xmltramp
>>> doc = xmltramp.Namespace("http://example.org/bar")
>>> bbc = xmltramp.Namespace("http://example.org/bbc")
>>> dc = xmltramp.Namespace("http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/")
>>> d = xmltramp.parse(sample_xml)
>>> d
<doc version="2.7182818284590451">...</doc>
>>> d('version')
'2.7182818284590451'
>>> d(version='2.0')
>>> d('version')
'2.0'
>>> d._dir
[<author>...</author>, <dc:creator>...</dc:creator>, <dc:creator>...</dc:creator>, <bbc:show bbc:station="4">...</bbc:show>]
>>> d._name
(u'http://example.org/bar', u'doc')
>>> d[0] # First child.
<author>...</author>
>>> d.author # First author.
<author>...</author>
>>> str(d.author)
'John Polk and John Palfrey'
>>> d[dc.creator] # First dc:creator.
<dc:creator>...</dc:creator>
>>> d[dc.creator:] # All creators.
[<dc:creator>...</dc:creator>, <dc:creator>...</dc:creator>]
>>> d[dc.creator] = "Me!!!"
>>> str(d[dc.creator])
'Me!!!'
>>> d[bbc.show](bbc.station)
'4'
>>> d[bbc.show](bbc.station, '5')
>>> d[bbc.show](bbc.station)
'5'
Most thanks go to Aaron Swartz, both for writing this in the first place, and just in general, for all he did.
Additional thanks to Kristian Glass, for helping get this over the Python3 hump, and for tests.