how to get content inside CDATA of XML tag django

Question

I am using urllib and beautifulsoup to parse xml file in django. I can't parse the content of description tag with CDATA.

my xml tag.

<item>
         <title>EU Confronting US Over Surveillance</title>
    <description><![CDATA[Voice of America is an international news and broadcast organization serving Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Balkan countries]]></description>
<guid>http://www.voanews.com/content/eu-confronting-us-over-surveillance/1778928.html</guid>
</item>

This description tag is inside the item tag views.py

for i in soup.findAll('item'):
 print i.description.string

If CDATA is not there means I can parse the contents inside descirption tag. I don't know how to parse this content. Please help me out Also how to get the image inside the tag..

<description>&lt;img src='http://static.ibnlive.in.com/ibnlive/pix/sitepix/10_2013/tony-abbott-visits-afghanistan-says-australias-war-is-over_291013013344_338x225.jpg' width='90' height='62'&gt;&lt;p&gt;"Australia's longest war" is ending and its defence forces mission in Afghanistan will be complete by 2013 end, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced in a statement on Tuesday.&lt;/p&gt;</description>

Possible duplicate of Can CDATA sections be preserved by BeautifulSoup? — user985366

Andy Andy · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-29T04:54:38

CData can be accessed like this:

>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> txt = '''<description><![CDATA[Voice of America is an international news and broadcast organization serving Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, the Middle East and Balkan countries]]></description>'''
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(txt)
>>> for cd in soup.findAll(text=True):
...   if isinstance(cd, BeautifulSoup.CData):
...     print 'CData value: %r' % cd
...
CData value: u'Voice of America is an international news and broadcast organi
zation serving Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, t
he Middle East and Balkan countries'
>>>

An edit based on your comment that should help.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, CData
import urllib

source_txt = urllib.urlopen("http://voanews.com/api/epiqq")
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(source_txt.read())
for cd in soup.findAll(text=True):
    if isinstance(cd, CData):
        print 'CData value: %r' % cd

Things to note:

The import statement. I'm importing the entire BeautifulSoup package
The urlopen parameter. It needs the http

how to get content inside CDATA of XML tag django

1 Answers