20.8. xml.dom.pulldom — Support for building partial DOM trees

Source code: Lib/xml/dom/pulldom.py

The xml.dom.pulldom module provides a “pull parser” which can also be asked to produce DOM-accessible fragments of the document where necessary. The basic concept involves pulling “events” from a stream of incoming XML and processing them. In contrast to SAX which also employs an event-driven processing model together with callbacks, the user of a pull parser is responsible for explicitly pulling events from the stream, looping over those events until either processing is finished or an error condition occurs.

Example:

from xml.dom import pulldom

doc = pulldom.parse('sales_items.xml')
for event, node in doc:
    if event == pulldom.START_ELEMENT and node.tagName == 'item':
        if int(node.getAttribute('price')) > 50:
            doc.expandNode(node)
            print(node.toxml())

event is a constant and can be one of:

• START_ELEMENT
• END_ELEMENT
• COMMENT
• START_DOCUMENT
• END_DOCUMENT
• CHARACTERS
• PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION
• IGNORABLE_WHITESPACE

node is a object of type xml.dom.minidom.Document, xml.dom.minidom.Element or xml.dom.minidom.Text.

Since the document is treated as a “flat” stream of events, the document “tree” is implicitly traversed and the desired elements are found regardless of their depth in the tree. In other words, one does not need to consider hierarchical issues such as recursive searching of the document nodes, although if the context of elements were important, one would either need to maintain some context-related state (i.e. remembering where one is in the document at any given point) or to make use of the DOMEventStream.expandNode() method and switch to DOM-related processing.

class xml.dom.pulldom.PullDom(documentFactory=None)

Subclass of xml.sax.handler.ContentHandler.

class xml.dom.pulldom.SAX2DOM(documentFactory=None)

Subclass of xml.sax.handler.ContentHandler.

xml.dom.pulldom.parse(stream_or_string, parser=None, bufsize=None)

Return a DOMEventStream from the given input. stream_or_string may be either a file name, or a file-like object. parser, if given, must be a XMLReader object. This function will change the document handler of the parser and activate namespace support; other parser configuration (like setting an entity resolver) must have been done in advance.

If you have XML in a string, you can use the parseString() function instead:

xml.dom.pulldom.parseString(string, parser=None)

Return a DOMEventStream that represents the (Unicode) string.

xml.dom.pulldom.default_bufsize

Default value for the bufsize parameter to parse().

The value of this variable can be changed before calling parse() and the new value will take effect.