Hi Aleksandra, No problem. I've dug the old XPath exercises out from a dusty disk and made them accessible here: http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~earawa/FoX/iFaX/iFaX.3/ with the introductory slide deck here: http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~earawa/FoX/iFaX/Docs/Practical3_intro.pdf
I forgot that by this point we had talked about XML namespaces... which complicate things. Best wishes, Andrew ________________________________________ From: Discuss [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Aleksandra Pawlik [[email protected]] Sent: 30 October 2014 14:17 Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss] Teaching very simple XML manipulation Dear All, What can I say...You are AMAZING :-) Thanks a lot for all emails and info. Very very useful already. Andrew, if it doesn't take too much of your time, can you point me to the old XPath exercises you mentioned? Yours truly grateful, Aleksandra On 30 October 2014 14:13, Andrew Walker [EAR] <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Aleksandra, > > A good few years ago I helped to put together and run a two day course on > "XML for Fortran programmers" (best not to ask why). Most of the hands on > for this was in Fortran; the first two exercises looked at how to create a > well-formed document the last two how to read one using DOM and SAX based > parsers. In between these we stuck an exercise on reading an XML document > using Python, mainly to show the simplicity of XPath based parsers (compared > with what was to come) but also to drive home the point that you can view a > well-formed XML document as a tree of nodes. > > I think the two important questions are: How much do you want your students > to learn about XML as a technology (as opposed to just being able to parse a > document)? Do you expect them to always deal with well-formed XML, or are > they likely to need to handle a wider range of XML-like documents later in > their course? > > If the lesson should be applicable to a wider range of documents I think > BeautifulSoup is probably the way to go. If the idea is to learn about the > details of XML I would probably start with an exercise using XPath and try to > focus on the subset that is supported by ElementTree (leaving the choice of > ElementTree and lxml as a detail for now). > > I can probably find the documentation for the old XPath exercises if they > will be useful. > > Cheers, > > Andrew > > > > > -- > Dr Andrew Walker > NERC Independent Research Fellow > School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds > http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.walker > > From: "Neil Chue Hong (SSI)" > <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > Date: Thursday, 30 October 2014 12:29 > To: Aleksandra Pawlik > <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > Cc: > "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" > > <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > Subject: Re: [Discuss] Teaching very simple XML manipulation > > Hi Aleksandra, > > what sort of manipulation are you going to ask your students to do? Is it > just finding elements and then doing something, or is it something more > complex. > > 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. > > Strangely, I recently did a little bit of XML parsing and used BeautifulSoup > (normally used for web pages) as I'm more used to it, and it does work (and > can use ElementTree or lxml as its basic parser). > > Neil > > On 30 October 2014 11:51, Aleksandra Pawlik > <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > Hello! > > We are running an SWC course at Manchester as a part of a one week > training for MSc students in Clinical Bioinformatics. We have 2.5 days > for SWC and then the students will work on a small programming task in > teams. The idea is that they will need to grab some XML files, parse > them and then do some rather simple manipulation with the outputs. > > At the end of the SWC (we'll be using Python) we want to show them how > to use a _simple_ library for XML. So before I dive into Google, I > though I'd be lazy and ask the SWC community: > 1) Has anyone created an SWC module on XML? If yes, can you point me to it? > 2) Which Python library from XML would you recommend? > 3) Do you have any other suggestions? > > Before you jump on me saying "What the heck are you doing?Software > Carpentry doesn't teach XML." I'll just say that the goal is _not_ to > focus on XML. We want to show them how to use Python libraries. XML is > an example and in the case of this particular audience, it is a better > example than NumPy and SciPy (we had lots of discussions with prof. > Andy Brass who runs the whole course). We will deliver the standard > SWC but the remaining 2 days they are supposed to try flying on their > own, working in groups writing a small program using what we taught > them (structured programming, version control etc.) > > So, halp? Anyone? > > Many thanks. > Aleksandra > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org > > > > > -- > Neil Chue Hong > Director, Software Sustainability Institute > EPCC, University of Edinburgh, JCMB, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK > Tel: +44 (0)131 650 5957 > http://www.software.ac.uk/ > > LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/neilchuehong > Twitter: http://twitter.com/npch > ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8876-7606 _______________________________________________ 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
