Generating nested lists from XML doc

Question

Working in python, my goal is to parse through an XML doc I made and create a nested list of lists in order to access them later and parse the feeds. The XML doc resembles the f

Answer 1

From your description, a dictionary with keys according to the source name and values according to the feed lists might do the trick.

Here is one way to construct such a beast:

from lxml import etree
from pprint import pprint

news_sources = {
    source.attrib['source'] : [feed.text for feed in source.xpath('./f')]
    for source in etree.parse('x.xml').xpath('/sources/sourceList')}

pprint(news_sources)

Another sample, without lxml or xpath:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from pprint import pprint

news_sources = {
    source.attrib['source'] : [feed.text for feed in source]
    for source in ET.parse('x.xml').getroot()}

pprint(news_sources)

Finally, if you are allergic to list comprehensions:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from pprint import pprint

xml = ET.parse('x.xml')
root = xml.getroot()
news_sources = {}
for sourceList in root:
    sourceListName = sourceList.attrib['source']
    news_sources[sourceListName] = []
    for feed in sourceList:
       feedName = feed.text
       news_sources[sourceListName].append(feedName)

pprint(news_sources)