Some ordered thoughts on Gnosis enhancements and XPath

I had dropped out of the blogging habit after Feb this year, mainly due to work pressures at office. I think it is time for me to dust out my blogging brush and start painting my blog a little bit, at least to touch up some of the loosing sheen here and there :-)

This is about a nice little utility called Gnosis utils which provides powerful XML parsing in very little code. The library is written by Dr. David Mertz who is a known authority on Python programming matters and has written some charming articles in his "Charming Python" series for IBM developerworks.

I was looking around for an XML API which provides powerful XPath parsing capabilities out of the box some time in March for a project I am doing at Spikesource. PyXML woefully lacks in this department. ElementTree, though a very good API for generic XML processing, falls short on its XPath support (no attributes etc).

Gnosis provides decent XPath support - it supports attributes, text searches but does not support attribute values, the [@attr] syntax etc.

During my work, I enhanced Gnosis XML to support some of the XPath 1.0 specs it do not support. These include,

o Support for //elem[@attr] syntax
o Search attributes by value - i.e support //elem[@attr=value] syntax
o Support //elem[last()]
o Support XPath searches in the root node

The good thing is that I have been able to extract out the Gnosis XML processing parts to a single module and add these enhancements on top of it. I plan to enhance this with the full XPath 1.0 specifications within a month or so and release it to public domain.

I hope this will address the existing void of lightweight pure Python APIs with full XPath support. The whole thing will fit inside a single module which should make it easy to use and extend.

Looking forward to completing this work!

BangPypers meet this Sunday

After a long time, the BangPypers are meeting this Sunday, the 26th again. The meeting is organized in the Spikesource conference room named Ruby. How is that for some co-operation between two popular dynamic languages !

Sidharth Kuruvila is giving a talk on one of his favorite topics, namely generators in Python. Sridhar Ratna of Amazon will talk on TurboGears, his favorite Python web dev framework. Also, Anush Shetty, a very active Python community member in Bangalore shall organize a BoF session on Python Education.

It is going to be an exciting event. If you are interested in Pythonic happenings in India's silicon valley, make sure you drop in to Spikesource offices in Diamond District on Airport Road on the 26th at 4.30 pm sharp.

Unfortunately, I cannot attend this meet since I am going out of Bangalore this week-end to visit my family. Deepan from Spikesource should take care of the meeting co-ordination.

Hope you all have a fun and informative session!

See the meeting description in the group's calendar for details and contact information.