Parsing an xml file and storing it into a database

Is there a generic/automatic way in R or in python to parse xml files with its nodes and attributes, automatically generate mysql tables for storing that informatio开发者_如何学Cn and then populate those tables.

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Is there a generic/automatic way in R to parse xml files with its nodes and attributes, automatically generate mysql tables for storing that information and then populate those tables.

the answer is a good old yes you can, at least in R.

The XML package for R can read XML documents and return R data.frame types in a single call using the xmlToDataFrame() function.

And the RMySQL package can transfer data.frame objects to the database in a single command---including table creation if need be---using the dbWriteTable() function defined in the common DBI backend for R and provided for MySQL by RMySQL.

So in short: two lines can do it, so you can easily write yourself a new helper function that does it along with a commensurate amount of error checking.

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They're three separate operations: parsing, table creation, and data population. You can do all three with python, but there's nothing "automatic" about it. I don't think it's so easy.

For example, XML is hierarchical and SQL is relational, set-based. I don't think it's always so easy to get a good relational schema for every single XML stream you can encounter.

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There's the XML package for reading XML into R, and the RMySQL package for writing data from R into MySQL.

Between the two there's a lot of work. XML surpasses the scope of a RDBMS like MySQL so something that could handle any XML thrown at it would be either ridiculously complex or trivially useless.

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We do something like this at work sometimes but not in python. In that case, each usage requires a custom program to be written. We only have a SAX parser available. Using an XML decoder to get a dictionary/hash in a single step would help a lot.

At the very least you'd have to tell it which tags map to which to tables and fields, no pre-existing lib can know that...