Python list to XML and vice versa

Question

I have some python code that I wrote to convert a python list into an XML element. It\'s meant for interacting with LabVIEW, hence the weird XML array format. Anyways, here\

Answer 1

Try the following:

from operator import mul

def validate(array, sizes):
    if reduce(mul, sizes) != len(array):
        raise ValueError("Array dimension incompatible with desired sizes")

    return array, sizes

def reshape(array, sizes):
    for s in sizes:
        array = [array[i:i + s] for i in range(0, len(array), s)]

    return array[0]

data = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
length = [2, 2, 3]

print reshape(validate(data, length))

length = [2, 2, 2]

print reshape(validate(data, length))

Output being:

[[[1, 2], [3, 4]], [[5, 6], [7, 8]], [[9, 10], [11, 12]]]
Traceback:
   (...)
ValueError: Array dimension incompatible with desired sizes

---

An alternative is using numpy arrays. Note that for this simple task, numpy is a rather big dependency, though you will find that most (common) array related tasks/problems already have an implementation there:

from numpy import array

print array(data).reshape(*length)  # optionally add .tolist() to convert to list

EDIT: Added data validation

EDIT: Example using numpy arrays (thanks to J.F.Sebastian for the hint)