GNU Info

(python2.1-lib.info)xml.parsers.expat

---

Next: xml.dom Prev: htmlentitydefs Up: Structured Markup Processing Tools

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

Fast XML parsing using Expat
============================

An interface to the Expat non-validating XML parser.  This module was
written by Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>.
This manual section was written by A.M. Kuchling <amk1@bigfoot.com>.
_Added in Python version 2.0_

The `xml.parsers.expat' module is a Python interface to the Expat
non-validating XML parser.  The module provides a single extension
type, `xmlparser', that represents the current state of an XML parser.
After an `xmlparser' object has been created, various attributes of the
object can be set to handler functions.  When an XML document is then
fed to the parser, the handler functions are called for the character
data and markup in the XML document.

This module uses the `pyexpat'  module to provide access to the Expat
parser.  Direct use of the `pyexpat' module is deprecated.

This module provides one exception and one type object:

`ExpatError'
     The exception raised when Expat reports an error.

`error'
     Alias for `ExpatError'.

`XMLParserType'
     The type of the return values from the `ParserCreate()' function.

The `xml.parsers.expat' module contains two functions:

`ErrorString(errno)'
     Returns an explanatory string for a given error number ERRNO.

`ParserCreate([encoding[, namespace_separator]])'
     Creates and returns a new `xmlparser' object.  ENCODING, if
     specified, must be a string naming the encoding used by the XML
     data.  Expat doesn't support as many encodings as Python does, and
     its repertoire of encodings can't be extended; it supports UTF-8,
     UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 (Latin1), and ASCII.  If ENCODING is given it
     will override the implicit or explicit encoding of the document.

     Expat can optionally do XML namespace processing for you, enabled
     by providing a value for NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR.  The value must be a
     one-character string; a `ValueError' will be raised if the string
     has an illegal length (`None' is considered the same as omission).
     When namespace processing is enabled, element type names and
     attribute names that belong to a namespace will be expanded.  The
     element name passed to the element handlers `StartElementHandler'
     and `EndElementHandler' will be the concatenation of the namespace
     URI, the namespace separator character, and the local part of the
     name.  If the namespace separator is a zero byte (`chr(0)') then
     the namespace URI and the local part will be concatenated without
     any separator.

     For example, if NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR is set to a space character (`
     ') and the following document is parsed:

          <?xml version="1.0"?>
          <root xmlns    = "http://default-namespace.org/"
                xmlns:py = "http://www.python.org/ns/">
            <py:elem1 />
            <elem2 xmlns="" />
          </root>

     `StartElementHandler' will receive the following strings for each
     element:

          http://default-namespace.org/ root
          http://www.python.org/ns/ elem1
          elem2

XMLParser Objects

ExpatError Exceptions

Example 8

Content Model Descriptions

Expat error constants