One other quick point: for generating XML, I would recommend against using ETree or lxml: instead, a templating engine such as Jinja or Mako is more fluent and easier. (I think, YMMV.)
-- Dr James Hetherington, Team Leader, Research Software Development Research IT Services University College London Tel: 02035495164 (Int. 65164) Mobile: 07946868834 Skype: ucgajhe Twitter: @uclrcsoftdev Blog: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/research-software-development/ Site: http://bit.ly/uclrsd > On 30 Oct 2014, at 15:27, W. Trevor King <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
