input networkx graph into zss algorithm (tree edit

Question

I want to compute the Zhang-Shasha tree-edit distance between 2 trees (zss library). However, my trees are in the form of networkx graphs (they actually represent DOM html trees). The example in the zss documentation shows how to create a tree by hand:

from zss import *
A = (
    Node("f")
        .addkid(Node("a")
            .addkid(Node("h"))
            .addkid(Node("c")
                .addkid(Node("l"))))
        .addkid(Node("e"))
    )
zss.simple_distance(A, A) # [0.0]

Which would be the same tree as:

import networkx as nx
G=nx.DiGraph()
G.add_edges_from([('f', 'a'), ('a', 'h'), ('a', 'c'), ('c', 'l'), ('f', 'e')])

so I would like to convert tree objects of networkx class into a zss Node object, then compute the edit distance between 2 trees.

Thanks

(and do not hesitate to tell me if you think this is a XY problem)

Answer 1

Using dfs_tree can definitely help:

import zss
import networkx as nx

G=nx.DiGraph()
G.add_edges_from([('f', 'a'), ('a', 'h'), ('a', 'c'), ('c', 'l'), ('f', 'e')])
T = nx.dfs_tree(G, source='f')
nodes_dict = {}
for edge in T.edges():
    if edge[0] not in nodes_dict:
        nodes_dict[edge[0]] = zss.Node(edge[0])
    if edge[1] not in nodes_dict:
        nodes_dict[edge[1]] = zss.Node(edge[1])
    nodes_dict[edge[0]].addkid(nodes_dict[edge[1]])

print(zss.simple_distance(nodes_dict['f'], nodes_dict['f'])) # 0.0

In case we don't know which node is G's root node, but know we have a valid tree, we can get the source node by calling:

source = [n for (n, d) in G.in_degree() if d == 0][0]
T = nx.dfs_tree(G, source=source)

Since the root is the only node with no incoming nodes, that should work.