On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 10:53:32AM -0200, Raniere Silva wrote: > > The idea is that they will need to grab some XML files, parse them > > and then do some rather simple manipulation with the outputs. > > What about using JSON or YAML instead of XML?
I agree that if the point is “(de)serializing structured data” (and not “maniplulate XML”), I'd use JSON. It even looks a lot like Python's dict/list/string/number syntax. For fun, you could have them drive the GitHub API [1] or NASA [2]. > > ElementTree vs lxml is the argument you'll get into for which > > Python XML library you're going to want to use. I can't comment on > > this. > > Just a few words from my experience. ElementTree avoid user to > install third party libraries but isn't easy to use. lxml is fast > but the documentation need a little improvement for a novice > perspective. lxml.etree [3] and the standard library's ElementTree [4] have a very similar syntax. lxml makes it easier to find siblings (see the “lxml.etree only!” comments in [3]), but I'd just stick to the standard library for a beginner class. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://developer.github.com/v3/ [2]: http://data.nasa.gov/api-info/ The first hit while searching for “json api science” ;) [3]: http://lxml.de/tutorial.html [4]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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