2013-11-21 Thursday - XML/XSD validation in Python and Installing PIP (Python Package Manager)

I'm working on developing a small utility to help automate the documentation and generation of some Enterprise Integration Architecture Context Diagrams from various spreadsheets that list the inventory of different systems and their integration (transforming the data into an XML canonical form, and then using that canonical form as the basis for generating graphviz .dot files).  This way, I will have a reusable tool that can be used across multiple projects - and simply either ask for the data in the canonical form - or limit my future effort to just getting it into the canonical form.

So I found myself needing to incorporate a few 3rd party Python packages into my solution, so I decided to spend some time this evening to finally install a decent package manager in my development environment.

First, install setuptools
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#using-setuptools-and-easyinstall


https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip
http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4750806/how-to-install-pip-on-windows

http://dubroy.com/blog/so-you-want-to-install-a-python-package/

Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages
http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

http://dubroy.com/blog/so-you-want-to-install-a-python-package/



My original need was to install a package to help develop some code that requires XSD/XML manipulation.

Initially, I thought would be a good fit for my need - but the pip install process seems have some issues (at least in my environment)
http://lxml.de/installation.html
http://lxml.de/validation.html#xmlschema
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17819884/xml-xsd-feed-validation-against-a-schema
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/578503-validate-xml-with-schemalocation/

A second possible package for consideration (although it doesn't appear to have any development since 2006...):
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyxsd

The xlrd package provides support for reading Excel spreadsheets:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd
http://www.python-excel.org/