python – How to convert an XML string to a dictionary?

xmltodict (full disclosure: I wrote it) does exactly that:

xmltodict.parse(
<?xml version=1.0 ?>
<person>
  <name>john</name>
  <age>20</age>
</person>)
# {uperson: {uage: u20, uname: ujohn}}

This is a great module that someone created. Ive used it several times.
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/410469-xml-as-dictionary/

Here is the code from the website just in case the link goes bad.

from xml.etree import cElementTree as ElementTree

class XmlListConfig(list):
    def __init__(self, aList):
        for element in aList:
            if element:
                # treat like dict
                if len(element) == 1 or element[0].tag != element[1].tag:
                    self.append(XmlDictConfig(element))
                # treat like list
                elif element[0].tag == element[1].tag:
                    self.append(XmlListConfig(element))
            elif element.text:
                text = element.text.strip()
                if text:
                    self.append(text)


class XmlDictConfig(dict):
    
    Example usage:

    >>> tree = ElementTree.parse(your_file.xml)
    >>> root = tree.getroot()
    >>> xmldict = XmlDictConfig(root)

    Or, if you want to use an XML string:

    >>> root = ElementTree.XML(xml_string)
    >>> xmldict = XmlDictConfig(root)

    And then use xmldict for what it is... a dict.
    
    def __init__(self, parent_element):
        if parent_element.items():
            self.update(dict(parent_element.items()))
        for element in parent_element:
            if element:
                # treat like dict - we assume that if the first two tags
                # in a series are different, then they are all different.
                if len(element) == 1 or element[0].tag != element[1].tag:
                    aDict = XmlDictConfig(element)
                # treat like list - we assume that if the first two tags
                # in a series are the same, then the rest are the same.
                else:
                    # here, we put the list in dictionary; the key is the
                    # tag name the list elements all share in common, and
                    # the value is the list itself 
                    aDict = {element[0].tag: XmlListConfig(element)}
                # if the tag has attributes, add those to the dict
                if element.items():
                    aDict.update(dict(element.items()))
                self.update({element.tag: aDict})
            # this assumes that if youve got an attribute in a tag,
            # you wont be having any text. This may or may not be a 
            # good idea -- time will tell. It works for the way we are
            # currently doing XML configuration files...
            elif element.items():
                self.update({element.tag: dict(element.items())})
            # finally, if there are no child tags and no attributes, extract
            # the text
            else:
                self.update({element.tag: element.text})

Example usage:

tree = ElementTree.parse(your_file.xml)
root = tree.getroot()
xmldict = XmlDictConfig(root)

//Or, if you want to use an XML string:

root = ElementTree.XML(xml_string)
xmldict = XmlDictConfig(root)

python – How to convert an XML string to a dictionary?

The following XML-to-Python-dict snippet parses entities as well as attributes following this XML-to-JSON specification. It is the most general solution handling all cases of XML.

from collections import defaultdict

def etree_to_dict(t):
    d = {t.tag: {} if t.attrib else None}
    children = list(t)
    if children:
        dd = defaultdict(list)
        for dc in map(etree_to_dict, children):
            for k, v in dc.items():
                dd[k].append(v)
        d = {t.tag: {k:v[0] if len(v) == 1 else v for k, v in dd.items()}}
    if t.attrib:
        d[t.tag].update((@ + k, v) for k, v in t.attrib.items())
    if t.text:
        text = t.text.strip()
        if children or t.attrib:
            if text:
              d[t.tag][#text] = text
        else:
            d[t.tag] = text
    return d

It is used:

from xml.etree import cElementTree as ET
e = ET.XML(
<root>
  <e />
  <e>text</e>
  <e name=value />
  <e name=value>text</e>
  <e> <a>text</a> <b>text</b> </e>
  <e> <a>text</a> <a>text</a> </e>
  <e> text <a>text</a> </e>
</root>
)

from pprint import pprint
pprint(etree_to_dict(e))

The output of this example (as per above-linked specification) should be:

{root: {e: [None,
                text,
                {@name: value},
                {#text: text, @name: value},
                {a: text, b: text},
                {a: [text, text]},
                {#text: text, a: text}]}}

Not necessarily pretty, but it is unambiguous, and simpler XML inputs result in simpler JSON. 🙂

Update

If you want to do the reverse, emit an XML string from a JSON/dict, you can use:

try:
  basestring
except NameError:  # python3
  basestring = str

def dict_to_etree(d):
    def _to_etree(d, root):
        if not d:
            pass
        elif isinstance(d, basestring):
            root.text = d
        elif isinstance(d, dict):
            for k,v in d.items():
                assert isinstance(k, basestring)
                if k.startswith(#):
                    assert k == #text and isinstance(v, basestring)
                    root.text = v
                elif k.startswith(@):
                    assert isinstance(v, basestring)
                    root.set(k[1:], v)
                elif isinstance(v, list):
                    for e in v:
                        _to_etree(e, ET.SubElement(root, k))
                else:
                    _to_etree(v, ET.SubElement(root, k))
        else:
            raise TypeError(invalid type:  + str(type(d)))
    assert isinstance(d, dict) and len(d) == 1
    tag, body = next(iter(d.items()))
    node = ET.Element(tag)
    _to_etree(body, node)
    return ET.tostring(node)

pprint(dict_to_etree(d))