Rip, Mix and Burn Python

In his post on Dynamically Extending API's Mark provided the groundwork for some Python code I was working on at the same time. Mark ends up creating a list of tuples from an RSS file. What I needed was to run over an RSS file and produce a dictionary for each 'item' encountered. In addition I needed the namespace mapping to be "fixed". In this case "fixed" means that 'dc' always maps to the Dublin Core namespace. It is one of the flexibility/difficulty tradeoffs you make when you choose to use XML. That is, the chosen pre-fix for an element in a namespace need not be the same from document to document. For example the following two documents should be treated exactly the same:

<item xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
  <title>MetaData</title>
  <dc:date>2003-01-12T00:18:05-05:00</bc:date>
  <link>http://bitworking.org/news/8</link>
  <description>Upon waking, the dinosaur...</description>
</item>

<root:item xmlns:bc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:root="" >
  <root:title>MetaData</root:title>
  <bc:date>2003-01-12T00:18:05-05:00</bc:date>
  <root:link>http://bitworking.org/news/8</root:link>
  <description>Upon waking, the dinosaur...</description>
</root:item>

In either case the desired output should be a dictionary populated as such:

{ 'link': 'http://bitworking.org/news/8', 
  'dc:date': '2003-01-12T00:18:05-05:00', 
  'description': 'Upon waking, the dinosaur...', 
  'title': 'MetaData'}

I needed code that would retreive all the sub-elements of 'item' and present them in a dictionary that maps the element name to it's value, with all the elements names being "fixed".

Building off of Mark's code XmlToDict.py does all that. Note that it has unit tests in the file that demonstrate how it operates. One other thing to note is the 'seperator' setting. This allows you to control the seperator to use when building up the dictionary keys. In the unit tests the ':' seperator is used so that element names are mapped as you would expect them in an XML file. For example 'dc:date'. This can be changed to use another character, which comes in handy if you are using a templating system that doesn't like colons in its dictionary keys.