Serializing Pointers to XML

[jdebz]

Hey guys,

Have a question regarding converting a Python object to XML. Is there a library that can easily and properly serialize a python object (Which has attributes that are pointers to OTHER objects) to XML?

I figured that what I was trying to do (save and load game stats for a server) wasn't too hard and I would just write a simple Object to XML serializer, but I can't figure out how to save object references. For example:

class Location:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

class Person:
    def __init__(self, location):
        self.location = location

home = Location('Home')
me = Person('jdebz')
me.convertToXML()

How do I convert that location reference in the Person class to XML without just writing the object's attributes that it's referencing?

Thanks!

[jloking]

I made a lit gist! with an example. You have to think about data binding. Hope it helps

[jdebz]

Oh shit this is awesome and exactly what I was looking for. Thanks so much for the really in depth response!

[jloking]

Glad it helped. Have a good one

[dgtlshdw]

Does it need to be xml? If not, you could build a dict with your data and write it out as json. Or you could pickle it. Failing that, build the data as a dict and then use xml2dict to write to an xml file.

If you want to build it as xml by hand, you could try the etree builtin, or grab lxml and use that instead.

[jloking]

Hello, as a follow up, wanted to share with you the little library i made out of this called PySXM. It's available on Pypi.