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I am trying to parse the xml from YouTube that is embedded in the code below. I am trying to display all of the titles. However, I am running into trouble when I try to print the 'title' only enter lines appear. Any advice?

#import library to do http requests:
import urllib2

#import easy to use xml parser called minidom:
from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
#all these imports are standard on most modern python implementations

#download the file:
file = urllib2.urlopen('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/buzzfeed/uploads?v=2&max-results=50')
#convert to string:
data = file.read()
#close file because we dont need it anymore:
file.close()

#parse the xml you downloaded
dom = parseString(data)
entry=dom.getElementsByTagName('entry')
for node in entry:
    video_title=node.getAttribute('title')
    print video_title
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1  
Please add an extract of the XML you want to parse. – user647772 Oct 8 '12 at 14:27
1  
Please, don't use minidom. The documentation tells you to use the ElementTree API instead. You can use the included version in the standard library, or use the excellent external lxml library which expands on that API. – Martijn Pieters Oct 8 '12 at 14:32
lxml.de – sean Oct 8 '12 at 14:42

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Title is not an attribute, it is a child element of an entry.

here is an example how to extract it:

for node in entry:
    video_title = node.getElementsByTagName('title')[0].firstChild.nodeValue
    print video_title
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up vote 0 down vote

There a small bug in your code. You access title as an attribute, although it's a child element of entry. Your code can be fixed by:

dom = parseString(data)
for node in dom.getElementsByTagName('entry'):
    print node.getElementsByTagName('title')[0].firstChild.data
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up vote 0 down vote

lxml can be a bit difficult to figure out, so here's a really simple beautiful soup solution (It's called beautifulsoup for a reason). You can also set up beautiful soup to use the lxml parser, so the speed is about the same.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(data) # data as is seen in your code
soup.findAll('title')

returns a list of title elements. you can also use soup.findAll('media:title') in this case to return just the media:title elements (the actual video names).

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