README.md

Basic Usage

import drill
doc = drill.parse(path_or_url_or_string)

# Drill down to a specific element.
print unicode(doc.book.title)

# Iterate through all "title" tags in the document.
for t in doc.iter('title'):
    print t.attrs, t.data

# Find all "bar" nodes with a "baz" child and a "foo" parent.
q = doc.find('//foo/bar[baz]')
# Easily access the first and last elements of matching results.
print q.first(), q.last()
# Iterate over results.
for e in q:
    do_something(e)

# Parse only elements matching some path
for e in drill.iterparse(filelike, xpath='root/*/something'):
    print e.tagname, e.data

Features

• Runnable test suite
• Python 3 support

Advantages

• Pure python
• Faster, more efficient parsing than ElementTree
  • Using ElementTree, a ~150 MB XML file (~3,000,000 elements) took ~46 seconds to parse, consuming ~1.3 GB of RAM
  • Parsing the same file using drill took ~24 seconds and consumed ~950 MB of RAM
  • Very unscientific benchmarks performed on a Core i5 @ 2.8 GHz, running Windows 7. YMMV.
• Lots of convenience methods for accessing elements quickly:
  • doc.response.resultCode.data
  • root[2].child['attr']
  • first/last/prev/next methods for traversing siblings