Hi,

I have file with 10 000 records of same element item (always same):

$ head test.xml
<channel>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>
<item><section>Twitter</section></item>

And run simply program for printing content of element section:

$ python pulldom.py test.xml | head
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter

Seems work fine:
$ python pulldom.py test.xml | wc -l
10000

But (in two cases of 10 000) gives me just "Twi" not Twitter:
$ python pulldom.py test.xml  | grep -v Twitter
Twi
Twi 


Why? This example program demonstrate big problems in my real application - xml.dom.pulldom is cutting content of some elements.

Thanks for any advice
Vojta Rylko

---------------------------
Python 2.5.4 (r254:67916, Feb 10 2009, 14:58:09)
[GCC 4.2.4] on linux2
---------------------------
pulldom.py:
---------------------------
file=open(sys.argv[1])
events = pulldom.parse(file)

for event, node in events:
        if event == pulldom.START_ELEMENT:
                if node.tagName == 'item':
                        events.expandNode(node)
                        print node.getElementsByTagName('section').item(0).firstChild.data

Please read
http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html?highlight=elementtree#xml.etree.ElementTree.iterparse
At START_ELEMENT, the element is not guaranteed to be fully populated;
you should handle the END_ELEMENT event instead.

This should be documented for the pulldom module as well, though.

Program below also splits two of 10 000 elements into two rows. Is it acceptable behavior?

OUTPUT (ill part)
=============
<DOM Text node "u'Twitter'">
<DOM Text node "u'\n'">
<DOM Text node "u'Twi'">
<DOM Text node "u'tter'">
<DOM Text node "u'\n'">
<DOM Text node "u'Twitter'">
<DOM Text node "u'\n'">
<DOM Text node "u'Twitter'">


PROGRAM
=============
for event, node in events:
        if event == pulldom.CHARACTERS:
                print node.data

Yes, sax parsers may split CHARACTER events. See also the discussion:
http://www.mail-archive.com/xml-sig@python.org/msg00234.html

Again, the END_ELEMENT event is guaranteed to return the complete node.

I have the same problem, and I tried the solution suggested in here, namely expanding the node at END_ELEMENT. It does not work, raising the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/group/project/onrbee/data/beetle2-eval-09/annotation_tools/logTools/add_start_times.py", line 163, in <module>
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/group/project/onrbee/data/beetle2-eval-09/annotation_tools/logTools/add_start_times.py", line 130, in main
    events.expandNode(node)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/_xmlplus/dom/pulldom.py", line 248, in expandNode
    parents[-1].appendChild(cur_node)
IndexError: list index out of range


The code fragment was:

  events = xml.dom.pulldom.parse( outName )
    for (event,node) in events:
        if (event == xml.dom.pulldom.END_ELEMENT) and (node.tagName == "message"):
             events.expandNode(node)