You should follow Rustom's advice before just diving into the blog post I linked to. Otherwise you risk blindly following things and losing your bearings when you run into bugs.
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 11:17 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 8:57:15 AM UTC+5:30, catperson wrote: > > I am new to programming, though not new to computers. I'm looking to > > teach myself Python 3 and am working my way through a tutorial. At > > the point I'm at in the tutorial I am tasked with parsing out an XML > > file created with a Garmin Forerunner and am just having a terrible > > time getting my head around the concepts. What I'm looking for is > > some suggested reading that might give me some of the theory of > > operation behind ElementTree and then how to parse out specific > > elements. Most of what I have been able to find in examples that I > > can understand use very simplistic XML files and this Garmin file is > > many levels of sub-elements and some of those elements have attributes > > assigned, like <Activity Sport="Running">. > > > > I'm hoping with enough reading I can experiment and work my way > > through the problem and end up with a hopefully clear understanding of > > the ElementTree module and Dictionairies. > > > > Thanks for any suggestions in advance. > > Suggestions: > 1. Learn to use the interpreter interactively; ie (at the least)¹ ie > > a. Start up python (without a program) > b. Play around with trivial expressions > c. Explore introspective features - help(), type() dir() > > 2. Do you know about triple-quoted strings? > a. Start small (or trivial) sub-parts of your XML as triple-quoted > examples in the > interpreter and start throwing them at elementtree > b. If they dont work trivialize further; if they work add complexity > ----------- > ¹ At the least because environments like Idle are more conducive to such > playing > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list >
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