How to set element's id in Python's xml.dom.minidom?

dom, minidom, python, xml

Solution

Two things are wrong here.

`Document.getElementById` will only find elements that are actually in the document. Here you've created `b` but not actually added it to the document. (It's exactly the same in JavaScript.)

You have to mark `id` as an ID attribute using `setIdAttribute`. (There's no need to do this in JavaScript because in HTML documents, attributes named `id` are automatically considered to be ID attributes, logically enough. But XML does not automatically treat attributes named `id` as IDs; you can either explicitly declare that they are in your DTD or call `setIdAttribute` individually for every ID attribute. And I am not sure the DTD thing will work with minidom, which is not a full DOM implementation.)

Like so:

import xml.dom.minidom as d
a = d.Document()
b = a.createElement('test')
a.appendChild(b)
b.setAttribute('id', 'x')
b.setIdAttribute('id')

After that, `getElementById` works:

>>> a.getElementById('x')
<DOM Element: test at 0xb77712ec>

Problem

How to? Created a document and an element: ``` import xml.dom.minidom as d a=d.Document() b=a.createElement('test') ``` setIdAttribute doesn't work :( ``` b.setIdAttribute('something') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 835, in setIdAttribute self.setIdAttributeNode(idAttr) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 843, in setIdAttributeNode raise xml.dom.NotFoundErr() xml.dom.NotFoundErr ``` And if I set this by hand, getElementById can't find it. ``` b.setAttribute('id', 'something') a.getElementById('something') ``` What I have to do?

Original source