Deleting Objects

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
delete.py
A simple effect that deletes the selected elements
as an example of functional (though likely not optimal) 
methods of:
	-extracting ids from the command line arguments
	-reading SVG document into a DOM tree object
	-locating and manipulating the selected nodes
	-serializing the DOM tree into an XML document on STDOUT

Reference:
http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/howto/section-DOM.html
"""
import sys, getopt
import xml.dom.ext
import xml.dom.ext.reader.Sax2
import xml.xpath

#collect ids from the arguments
opts = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:],'',['id='])
ids = [opt[1] for opt in opts[0] if opt[0]=='--id']

#create xml parser
reader = xml.dom.ext.reader.Sax2.Reader()
#open SVG tempfile
stream = open(sys.argv[-1:][0],'r')
#create DOM object
doc = reader.fromStream(stream)
stream.close()

#Code to modify the DOM object goes here
for id in ids:
	path = '//*[@id="%s"]' % id
	for node in xml.xpath.Evaluate(path,doc):
		node.parentNode.removeChild(node)

#serialize DOM object into XML on stdout
xml.dom.ext.Print(doc)

Files:

• delete.py
• delete.inx