New to Python and recursion - XML parsing

Question

I can open and read an XML file.

What I'd like to do is a recursion to print out all child elements of the current node.

The (awful) iterative approach has nested for loops:

root = tree.getroot()
for child in root:
    print (child.tag, child.text)
    for gen1 in child:
        print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t\t", gen1.text)
        for gen2 in gen1:
            print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" ,gen2.tag, "\t\t", gen2.text)
            for gen3 in gen2:
                print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" , gen2.tag, "\t", gen3.tag, "\t\t", gen3.text)
                for gen4 in gen3:
                    print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" , gen2.tag, "\t", gen3.tag, "\t", gen4.tag, "\t\t", gen4.text)
                    for gen5 in gen4:
                        print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" , gen2.tag, "\t", gen3.tag, "\t", gen4.tag, "\t", gen5.tag, "\t\t", gen5.text)
                        for gen6 in gen5:
                            print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" , gen2.tag, "\t", gen3.tag, "\t", gen4.tag, "\t", gen5.tag, "\t", gen6.tag, "\t\t", gen6.text)
                            for gen7 in gen6:
                                print(child.tag, "\t" , gen1.tag, "\t" , gen2.tag, "\t", gen3.tag, "\t", gen4.tag, "\t", gen5.tag, "\t", gen6.tag, "\t", gen7.tag, "\t\t", gen7.text)

I can't wrap my head around "this node has no children" for the stop of recursion. Any suggestions?

Shihab Shahriar Khan · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-14 09:49:56Z

1

Here is a solution, I might get the formatting wrong:

def traverse(node,ances):
    to_print = f"{ances}{node.tag}\t{node.text}"
    print(to_print)
    for child in node:
        traverse(child,to_print+"\t")

traverse(root,"")

You don't need to set explicit stop condition when there isn't any child. Here, there won't be any traverse call inside for loop in that case, and recursion will automatically stop.

answered Aug 14, 2019 at 9:49

Shihab Shahriar Khan

5,5352 gold badges20 silver badges28 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

New to Python and recursion - XML parsing

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related