Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great scripting language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, you can gain insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with over 100 recipes on the latest version of Python. The recipes will benefit everyone ranging from beginner to an expert. The book is broken down into 13 chapters that build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. The recipes will touch upon all the necessary Python concepts related to data structures, OOP, functional programming, as well as statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively use the advantages that it offers. You will end the book equipped with the knowledge of testing, web services, and configuration and application integration tips and tricks. The recipes take a problem-solution approach to resolve issues commonly faced by Python programmers across the globe. You will be armed with the knowledge of creating applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, and command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Reading XML documents


The XML markup language is widely used to organize data. For details, see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/. Python includes a number of libraries for parsing XML documents.

XML is called a markup language because the content of interest is marked with <tag> and </tag> constructs that define the structure of the data. The overall file includes the content plus the XML markup text.

Because the markup is intermingled with our text, there are some additional syntax rules that must be used. In order to include the < character in our data, we'll use XML character entity references to avoid confusion. We use &lt; to be able to include < in our text. Similarly, &gt; is used instead of >, &amp; is used instead of &, and &quot; is also used to embed a " in an attribute value.

A document, then, will have items as follows:

    <team><name>Team SCA</name><position>...</position></team> 

Most XML processing allows...