Parsing XML documents with LXML

Question

I'm new to LXML, and parsing XML documents in general. I have written a small section of code that appears to do what I need it too do, but it feels like I have overly complicated it. Is there any way I can simplify this?

Method:

def importFromXML(self, filename):
    tree = etree.parse(filename)
    for child in tree.getroot():
        if child.tag != 'SLOT':
            print('Tag:', child.tag, ', Text', child.text)
        elif child.tag == 'SLOT':
            for slot, index in child.items():
                for attribute in child:
                    print('Slot Number =', index, ', Tag:', attribute.tag, ', Value:', attribute.text)

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Item>
<ActiveState>drop</ActiveState>
<Location>Left Wrist</Location>
<Realm>All</Realm>
<ItemName>Band of the Dream Conqueror</ItemName>
<ItemQuality>100</ItemQuality>
<Equipped>1</Equipped>
<Level>50</Level>
<TYPE>Wrist</TYPE>
<SOURCE>Drop</SOURCE>
<DBSOURCE>kscraft</DBSOURCE>
<SLOT Number="0">
    <Type>Resist</Type>
    <Effect>Crush</Effect>
    <Amount>6</Amount>
</SLOT>
<SLOT Number="1">
    <Type>Resist</Type>
    <Effect>Thrust</Effect>
    <Amount>6</Amount>
</SLOT>
<SLOT Number="2">
    <Type>Resist</Type>
    <Effect>Slash</Effect>
    <Amount>6</Amount>
</SLOT>
</Item>

I just want to make sure I'm doing this right. I'm using Python 3.x. Eventually I will be doing more with the data I pull, but for right now I'm just trying to pull the information, and figure out the most optimized way of doing this.

Answer 1

The code isn't actually doing much, there's little to review to be honest, it's not looking complicated for what it is. Of course don't just have everything in a couple of loops, perhaps have some handlers to dispatch on the tags or so (handlers[child.tag](child) ...).

I suppose if you wanted a relatively quick way to write the importer code, consider XPath. If you wanted quick processing (by not building up the full DOM in memory), consider using a SAX handler.

Finally, there might be a library to automatically map the XML to a class structure, or even parse it directly into dict instances or something, if you prefer that, but I don't any off the top of my hat.