Python Adventures

Problem
I had an XML file (an RSS feed) from which I wanted to extract some data. I tried some XML libraries but I didn’t like any of them. Is there a simple, brain-friendly way for this? After all, it’s Python, so everything should be simple.

Solution
Yes, there is a simple library for reading XML called “untangle“, developed by Chris Stefanescu. It’s in PyPI, so installation is very easy:

sudo pip install untangle

For some examples, visit the project page.

Use Case
Let’s see a simple, real-world example. From the RSS feed of Planet Python, let’s extract the post titles and their URLs.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import untangle

#XML = 'examples/planet_python.xml'     # can read a file too
XML = 'http://planet.python.org/rss20.xml'

o = untangle.parse(XML)
for item in o.rss.channel.item:
    title = item.title.cdata
    link = item.link.cdata
    if link:
        print title
        print '   ', link

It couldn’t be any simpler :)

Limitations
According to Chris, untangle doesn’t support documents with namespaces (yet).

Related posts

• Write XML

Alternatives (update 20111031)
Here are some alternatives (thanks reddit).

• Python and XML (overview)
• lxml
• amara [official tutorial]
• xmltodict (converts XML to dict; added on 20141229)

lxml and amara are heavyweight solutions and are built upon C libraries so you may not be able to use them everywhere. untangle is a lightweight parser that can be a perfect choice to read a small and simple XML file.