Is there any way to change the element Node name in minidom Python?

Question

I have come across minidom APIs to get the child, get parent, set and get attribute, delete them.

Consider the following XML:

<TECH_COMPANIES>
    <APPLE>
        <IPHONE>
            <IPHONE6>sameOld </IPHONE6>
        </IPHONE>
        <IPAD>nice</IPAD>
        <MAC>awesome</MAC>
    </APPLE>

    <GOOGLE>
        <GMAIL>BREEZE</GMAIL>
        <PICASA>COOL_SHARE</PICASA>
    </GOOGLE>

    <LENOVO> </LENOVO>

    <SAMSUNG>
        <NOTE1> 
            <GORRILLA_GLASS ScratchProof="yes" Tranparency="99%" Smoothness="85%"/> 
        </NOTE1>

    </SAMSUNG>
</TECH_COMPANIES>

APPLE, GOOGLE, LENOVO and SAMSUNG are the child Element nodes of TECH_COMPANIES. suppose I want to change the name of element node 'APPLE' to 'APPLEinc, how do I go about changing it?

Answer 1

The minidom gives you a standard-ish DOM API implementation. The W3C DOM API has no means to rename elements; instead you are expected to recreate the element and re-populate it from the old. This is painful, to say the least. So the procedure would be to:

• use Document.createElement()
• Copy across any attributes across using the attribute methods on the Element interface.
• append all children of the old node to the new node, using the Node interface.

Rather than use a DOM API, you'd be better of switching to to the ElementTree API; this allows you to manipulate the tree in a far more pythonic manner:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

root = ET.fromstring(xml_string)
apple = root.find('.//APPLE')
apple.tag = 'APPLEinc'
xml_string = ET.tostring(root)