Develop Reference

parse and import data structure in Python from Franca interface descriptive language (fidl) files

Is there a Python library for reading and parsing fidl files? Ideally I would like to represent the datastructure described in the fidl as a Python dictionary, so that it can then be manipulated easily.
I was looking into pyfranca but it seems unmaintained and lacking proper documentation even for basic stuff.
Honestly, I could not find much more, so any help would be appreciated.

TexSoup for Bib-Files

this is my first question so I will try to do everything as proper as possible.
I am currently using LaTeX to write my documents at my University because I want to use the powerful citing capabilities provided by BibTeX. For ease of use, I am writing on scripts that will implement my .bib-files into my .tex files easier and allow easier management of my .bib-files. As I am using Arch Linux, I did this in bash, but it is a little clunky. Therefore I wanted to switch to python, as I came across the TexSoup-library for Python.
My issue is now, that I cannot find resources regarding the use of TexSoup for .bib files, I can only find resources on .tex-files. Does anybody know, if and if yes how I can use TeXSoup to find books / articles or other entries in my bib-files with python (or the TexSoup-library)?
with open("bib_complete.bib") as f:
soup = TexSoup(f)
print(soup)
This is a code sample I am trying to use, but I don't know how to look for entry names or entry-types with the package. I would really appreciate if someone could guide me to good resources if they exist.
I hope my writing was comprehensive enough and not too long.
Thanks everybody!

saving back to a docx xml file with python

I am trying to preform find and replace on docx files, whilst still maintaining formatting.
From reading up on this, the best way seems to be preforming the find/replace on the xml file of the document.
I can load in the xml file and find/replace on it, but unsure how to write it back.
docx:
Hello {text}!
python:
import zipfile
zip = zipfile.ZipFile(open('test.docx', 'rb'))
xmlString = zip.read('word/document.xml').decode('utf-8')
xmlString.replace('{text}', 'world')

What you are trying is dangerous, because you are processing a high lever docx file at a lower level. If you really want to do it, just use the hints from overwriting file in ziparchive as suggested by #shahvishal.
But unless you fully know all the details of docx format, my advice is : do not do that. Suppose there is for any reason in an internal field or attribute the string {text}. You are likely to change the file in an unexpected way leading immediately or even worse later to the destruction of the file (Word being no longer able to process it).
If you do your processing on a Windows machine with an installed word, you certainly could try to use automation to process the file with Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, I only did that long time ago and cannot give useful links. You will need:
general knowledge on pywin30 module
sufficient knowledge on the Automation interface of MS/WORD. Hopefully, its documentation is nice with many examples provided you have a full installation of Microsoft Office including macro help

You're really going to want to use a library for reading/writing docx files rather than trying to just deal with them as raw XML. A cursory search came up with the pypi module docx but I haven't used this module so I can't endorse it:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/docx/0.2.4
I've had the (unfortunate) experience of dealing with the manipulation of MS Office documents from other programming languages, and spending the time to find good libraries really paid off.
The old saying goes "don't reinvent the wheel" and I think that's definitely true when manipulating non-trivial file formats. If a somewhat mature library exists to do the job, use it!

You would need to replace the file in the zip archive. There is no "simple" way of achieving this. The following is a question that should help:
overwriting file in ziparchive

comparing two files and saving the report in any other file

I would like to compare the dat of two files and store the report in another file.I tried using winmerge by invoking cmd.exe using subprocess module in python3.2.i was able to get the difference report but wasnt able to save that report.Is there a way with winmerge or with any other comparing tools(diffmerge/kdiff3) to save the difference report using cmd.exe in windows7?please help

Though your question is quite old, I wonder it wasn't answered yet. I was searching myself for an answer and funnily I found yours. Perhaps you mix quite a lot questions into one mail. So I decided to answer the main headline, where I suppose you try to compare human readable file contents.
To compare two files, there is a difflib library which is part of the Python distribution.
By the way an example how to generate a utility to compare files can be found on Python's documentation website.
The link is here: Helpers for computing deltas
From there you can learn to create an option and save deltas to a e.g. textfile or something. Some of these examples contain also a git-difference-like output, which possibly helps you to solve your question.
This means, if you are able to execute your script, then other delta tools are not required. It makes not soo much sense to call other tools via Python on CMD and try to control them... :)
Maybe also this Website with explanations and code examples may help you:
difflib – Compare sequences
I hope that helps you a bit.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, that the last site contains a straightforward example how to generate an HTML output:
HTML Output

What's a good document standard to use programmatically?

I'm writing a program that requires input in the form of a document, it needs to replace a few values, insert a table, and convert it to PDF. It's written in Python + Qt (PyQt). Is there any well known document standard which can be easily used programmatically? It must be cross platform, and preferably open.
I have looked into Microsoft Doc and Docx, which are binary formats and I can't edit them. Python has bindings for it, but they're only on Windows.
Open Office's ODT/ODF is zipped in an xml file, so I can edit that one but there's no command line utilities or any way to programmatically convert the file to a PDF. Open Office provides bindings, but you need to run Open Office from the command line, start a server, etc. And my clients may not have Open Office installed.
RTF is readable from Python, but I couldn't find any way/libraries to convert RTF documents to PDF.
At the moment I'm exporting from Microsoft Word to HTML, replacing the values and using PyQt to convert it to a PDF. However it loses formatting features and looks awful. I'm surprised there isn't a well known library which lets you edit a variety of document formats and convert them into other formats, am I missing something?
Update: Thanks for the advice, I'll have a look at using Latex.
Thanks,
Jackson

Have you looked into using LaTeX documents?
They are perfect to use programatically (compiling documents? You gotta love that...), and you have several Python frameworks you can use such as plasTeX and PyTex.
Exporting a LaTeX documents to PDF is almost immediate.

Since you're already using PyQt anyway, it might be worth looking at Qt's built-in RTF processing module which looks decent. Here's the documentation on detailed content manipulation including inserting tables. Also the QPrinter module's default print-to-file format happens to be PDF.
Without knowing more about your particular needs it's hard to say if these would do what you want, but since your application already has PyQt as a dependency, seems silly to introduce any more without evaluating the functionality you've already got available.
The non-GUI parts of the Qt framework are often overlooked though.
edit: included more links.

You might want to try ReportLab. The open source version can write PDFs, and the commercial version has a lot of really nice abstractions to allow output to a variety of different formats from a single input.

I don't know the kind of odience of your program, Tex is good and i would go with it.
Another possible choice is Excel format, parsing it with xlrd.
I've used it a couple of time and it's pretty straightforward.
Excel file is a good for the following reasons:
Well known format easy to edit
You could prepare a predefined template with constrains and table

Creating XML documents, transforming them to XSL/fo and rendering with Fop or RenderX. If you use docbook as the primary input, there are toolchains freely available for converting that to PDF, RTF, HTML and so forth.
It is rather quirky to use and not my idea of fun, but is does deliver and can be embedded in an application, AFAICT.
Creating docbook is very straightforward as it has a wide range of semantic tags, table support etc to give a "meaningful" markup which can be reliably formatted. The XSL stylesheets are modular and allow parts to be customized or replaced to generate your own look and feel.
It works well for relatively free flow documents with lots of text.
For filling in the blanks kind of documents, a regular reporting engine may be a better fit, or some straighforward XSL stylesheets spitting out the XSL-fo directly.