this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Python

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Parsing XML, am I over complicating things? (lemmy.tf)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have this XML

<subsonic-response xmlns="http://subsonic.org/restapi" status="ok" version="1.16.1" type="navidrome" serverVersion="0.50.2 (823bef54)" openSubsonic="true"><searchResult3><song id="3b9d81b5def61a60705b9b89611a217f" parent="03693dd7b835740421cc1d6a4da201f3" isDir="false" title="Good Day featuring ScHoolboy Q" album="I Am &gt; I Was" artist="21 Savage" track="11" year="2018" genre="Rap" coverArt="mf-3b9d81b5def61a60705b9b89611a217f_5c1d3668" size="9716623" contentType="audio/mpeg" suffix="mp3" duration="242" bitRate="320" path="21 Savage/I Am &gt; I Was/11 - Good Day featuring ScHoolboy Q.mp3" created="2024-01-08T16:40:53.026754212Z" albumId="03693dd7b835740421cc1d6a4da201f3" artistId="1ae1d36568c651d53f78f427f05e9766" type="music" isVideo="false" bpm="0" comment=""><genres name="Rap"></genres></song></searchResult3></subsonic-response>

Which I got from an API call

I would like to be able to interact with it so I can check the artist and then pull the id

I thought this would be as simple as calling a key on an array (wrong terminology I know. Dict?), how wrong was I?

Having done some searching, I'm in the process of figuring out how xml.etree.ElementTree works. But it feels so overly complicated for what I'm trying to do? Am I going down the wrong path?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Perhaps knowing just a bit of xpath would solve your problem?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Thank you for your thoughtful suggestion. I ended up getting it done with the JSON parser. Everything should be as easy as JSON

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Actually XPATH is arguably more flexible than JSON. There's also jsonpath, but I don't think I've seen it meaningfully used

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do you mind explaining why?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

In both XML and JSON you have lists and embedding hierarchichies (I use this term to abstract away from dictionaries/maps which are not exactly represented in XML). These allow for browsing/iterating and filtering when after a particular node.

One difference is that nodes in XML are named (tags). Another thing that you have in XML and not in JSON is attributes. A good example of their use is querying by tag name, node id or class attributes in HTML (which is a loose example of XML). To do the equivalent in JSON, you need to work with keys and values which are less structured and (arguably as consequence) often missing such meta-data. HTML is a popular example, but pretty much any XML has ids and other meta tags and attributes. JSON standards typically don't and it's a long separate topic whether this is due to the characteristics of the format itself.

PS: another big difference is that XML also allows for comments, which allows to also encode intent, not only content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It seems that XML is better suited for more complex data?

Sorry I took so long to reply, I couldn't wrap my head around it.

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