Reading Text From XML Nodes Using Python's Libxml2

I am a first time XPath user and need to be able to get the text values of these different elements.. for instance time, title, etc.. I am using the libxml2 module in Python and so

Solution 1:

You can call getContent() on each returned xmlNode object to retrieve the associated text. Note that this is recursive -- to non-recursively access text content in libxml2, you'll want to retrieve the associated text node under the element, and call .getContent() on that.

That said, this would be easier if you used lxml.etree (a higher-level Python API, still backing into the C libxml2 library) instead of the Python libxml2; in that case, it's simply element.text to access the associated content as a string.

Solution 2:

Have a look at Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python 3, Chapter 12. XML

The chapter starts with short course to XML (general talk but with the Atom Syndication Feed example), then it continues with the standard xml.etree.ElementTree and continues with third party lxml that implements more with the same interface (full XPATH 1.0, based on libxml2).