Hi Charlie, Charlie Clark schrieb am 18.01.24 um 12:13:
I was recently wondering about the best way to edit XML documents using both a streaming reader and writer. I'm sure this is possible using iterparse and xmlfile but I seem to remember that iterparse produces the full tree so that parent elements and their children are returned.
You might want to look into the more general XMLPullParser, but yes, both that and iterparse() generate a full XML tree in the back. The idea is that you actively delete parts of it when you're done with them, but you gain easy tree navigation for that. If you need to do somewhat complex and non-local tree transformations, the additional tree building and cleanup work is a price you might want to pay.
Alternatively, for the parsing side, there's also still SAX (i.e. pass a "target" object into the parser). It matches somewhat well with xmlfile(), at the cost of requiring separate callback methods and thus, probably, some state keeping on your side. But depending on the kind of "editing" that you're doing on your XML documents, it might not be too bad.
Basically, lxml can do all the state keeping for you if you let it build a tree (but then you have to clean up after yourself to save memory), or you choose to do all the state keeping yourself and take the bare parse events, and then have full control over the amount of state that you keep. Whatever is better for your use case.
Stefan _______________________________________________ lxml - The Python XML Toolkit mailing list -- lxml@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to lxml-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/lxml.python.org/ Member address: arch...@mail-archive.com
