Python & XML

Organization

This book is divided into ten chapters and six appendixes, as follows:

Chapter 1

This chapter offers a broad overview of XML and why Python is particularly well-suited to XML processing.

Chapter 2

This chapter provides a good introduction to XML for newcomers and a refresher for programmers who have some familiarity with the standard.

Chapter 3

This chapter gives a detailed introduction to using Python with the SAX interface, for generating parse events from an XML data stream.

Chapter 4

This chapter provides an introduction to working with DOM, which is the dominant object-oriented, tree-based API to an XML document.

Chapter 5

This chapter discusses using a traversal language to extract portions of documents that meet your application’s requirements.

Chapter 6

This chapter details using XSLT to perform transformations on XML documents.

Chapter 7

This chapter discusses validating XML generated from other sources.

Chapter 8

This chapter provides an overview of Python’s high-level support for Internet protocols, including tools for building both clients and servers for HTTP.

Chapter 9

This chapter offers discussion of and examples showing how to build and use web services with Python.

Chapter 10

This chapter is an extended example that shows a variety of approaches to applying Python in constructing an XML-based distributed system.

Appendix A

This appendix provides instructions on installing Python and the major XML packages used throughout this book.

Appendix B

This appendix gives a list of definitions from the XML specification and a Python script to extract them from the specification itself.

Appendix C

This appendix offers detailed API information for using the dominant event-based XML interface in Python.

Appendix D

This appendix provides detailed interface documentation for using the standard tree-oriented API for XML from Python.

Appendix E

This appendix gives information on Microsoft’s XML libraries available for Python.

Appendix F

This appendix is a summary of the many additional tools that are available for using XML with Python, and a list of starting points for additional information on the Web.