Python - XML Processing
Categories: Python
XML is a portable, open source language that allows programmers to develop applications that can be read by other applications, regardless of operating system and/or developmental language.
What is XML?
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language much like HTML or SGML. This is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium and available as an open standard.
XML is extremely useful for keeping track of small to medium amounts of data without requiring a SQL-based backbone.
XML Parser Architectures and APIs
The Python standard library provides a minimal but useful set of interfaces to work with XML.
The two most basic and broadly used APIs to XML data are the SAX and DOM interfaces.
Simple API for XML (SAX) − Here, you register callbacks for events of interest and then let the parser proceed through the document. This is useful when your documents are large or you have memory limitations, it parses the file as it reads it from disk and the entire file is never stored in memory.
Document Object Model (DOM) API − This is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation wherein the entire file is read into memory and stored in a hierarchical (tree-based) form to represent all the features of an XML document.