Prerequisites

To begin, ensure you have Python installed on your computer. If you haven't done so yet, download and set up the appropriate distribution from the official website. After installation, open your favorite text editor or IDE to start working with XML file processing in Python.

Section 1.1: Parsing XML Files

Let's consider an example XML document saved as example.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<root>

<element attr="value">Text content</element>

</root>

To parse this XML file, we will use Python's xml.etree.ElementTree module. First, import the necessary libraries and load the XML data:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('example.xml')

root = tree.getroot()

The root variable now contains a parsed Element object that includes metadata and child elements. You can iterate through the child nodes using list comprehension or traditional loop constructs:

children = [child.tag for child in root]

print('Children tags:n', children)

To access the attributes and values of individual elements, use the following code:

for elem in root:

print('Tag: ', elem.tag)

print('Attributes:', elem.attrib)

print('Value: ', elem.text)

Section 1.2: Creating XML Files

Building a new XML document involves creating Element objects and nesting them within parent containers. Here’s how to create a more complex XML file based on our previous examples:

# Create root element

top = ET.Element('top')

# Nested elements

elem1 = ET.SubElement(top, 'elem1', attrib={'attr': 'val'})

elem2 = ET.SubElement(top, 'elem2')

# Append text content

elem1.text = 'Text content 1'

elem2.text = 'Text content 2'

# Save to file

tree = ET.ElementTree(top)

tree.write('output.xml')

This process results in the creation of an XML hierarchy that is correctly indented and syntactically valid.