I've tried xmltramp and element tree, but these tools aren't what I had in mind. I've come to the realization that it's not the tools that are lacking. In fact, I'm a big fan of ElementTree now, but would only use it for large parsing tasks. Instead, I think the problem is either inherent in the XML standard, or I'm missing something conceptually.
Let me elaborate. Most of these tools I've experimented with parse a document rather easily into a structure that I can traverse one element at a time. Each level of a node/tree has 4 basic pieces: 1) the tag, 2) one or more attributes, 3) encapsulated data, and 4) children nodes/trees >From what I understand, this is how XML was standardized, in a sort of hierarchical structure of infinite possibilities. The problem I'm having with these structures is that I need to actively search through each level for the item I want. All I really want to do is access one or more elements at the same time and know where they are without searching. What I'm looking to use are basic structures such as: root.path root.input.method root.input.filename root.output.filename to name a few. Since these are essentially unique constants that will only be used once or twice, I want to be able to place them in a function argument, or concatenate several of them, such as root.path and root.input.filename to create a new string. I'm finding it rather impossible to do such things unless I basically create my own structure from the tree structure that I get when I parse the XML document. If I used a simple INI file or CSV file, I would simply have to parse my file once and match the name with the value. Why is it necessary to parse a document once and then re-parse your information into a format that you can use. This seems absurd to me. Any thoughts on this? Do I even have the correct understanding of how this is done? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list