Dive Into Python

A grammar file defines a series of ref elements. Each ref contains one or more p elements, which can contain a lot of different things, including xrefs. Whenever you encounter an xref, you look for a corresponding ref element with the same id attribute, and choose one of the ref element's children and parse it. (You'll see how this random choice is made in the next section.)

This is how you build up the grammar: define ref elements for the smallest pieces, then define ref elements which "include" the first ref elements by using xref, and so forth. Then you parse the "largest" reference and follow each xref, and eventually output real text. The text you output depends on the (random) decisions you make each time you fill in an xref, so the output is different each time.

This is all very flexible, but there is one downside: performance. When you find an xref and need to find the corresponding ref element, you have a problem. The xref has an id attribute, and you want to find the ref element that has that same id attribute, but there is no easy way to do that. The slow way to do it would be to get the entire list of ref elements each time, then manually loop through and look at each id attribute. The fast way is to do that once and build a cache, in the form of a dictionary.

Example 10.14. loadGrammar

    def loadGrammar(self, grammar):                         
        self.grammar = self._load(grammar)                  
        self.refs = {}                                       
        for ref in self.grammar.getElementsByTagName("ref"): 
            self.refs[ref.attributes["id"].value] = ref       

	Start by creating an empty dictionary, self.refs.
	As you saw in Section 9.5, “Searching for elements”, getElementsByTagName returns a list of all the elements of a particular name. You easily can get a list of all the ref elements, then simply loop through that list.
	As you saw in Section 9.6, “Accessing element attributes”, you can access individual attributes of an element by name, using standard dictionary syntax. So the keys of the self.refs dictionary will be the values of the id attribute of each ref element.
	The values of the self.refs dictionary will be the ref elements themselves. As you saw in Section 9.3, “Parsing XML”, each element, each node, each comment, each piece of text in a parsed XML document is an object.

Once you build this cache, whenever you come across an xref and need to find the ref element with the same id attribute, you can simply look it up in self.refs.

    def do_xref(self, node):
        id = node.attributes["id"].value
        self.parse(self.randomChildElement(self.refs[id]))

You'll explore the randomChildElement function in the next section.