Parsing an arbitrary XML file with ElementTree

Using ElementTree:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as et

filehandler = open("file.xml","r")
raw_data = et.parse(filehandler)
data_root = raw_data.getroot()
filehandler.close()

for children in data_root:
    for child in children:
        print(child.tag, child.text, children.tag, children.text)

That will give you an overview of the XML-tags and associated text inside tags. You can add more loops to step further into the tree, and perform checks to see wether any of the children contains further levels. I find this method useful when the name of the XML tags varies and does not follow an already known standard.

An example using BeautifulSoup:

import sys 
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

file = sys.argv[1]
handler = open(file).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(handler)

for table in soup.find_all("target_table"):
  for loc in table.find_all("rep"):
    print loc.xlocation.string + ", " + loc.ylocation.string

Output

nextXREL, nextYREL