Question

Your team must build asset management reporting for a fleet of legacy IOS switches that do not support RESTCONF or NETCONF. Using Python with the Netmiko library, you retrieve raw output from 'show interfaces status' and 'show vlan brief' over SSH. The business requirement is to transform this unstructured CLI text into structured Python dictionaries so the data can be loaded into a JSON inventory database without writing fragile custom regular expressions for each command. Which approach best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Call send_command() with use_textfsm=True so Netmiko applies the ntc-templates TextFSM templates and returns parsed structured data

Answer

Wrap each send_command() call in a series of re.match() patterns and manually split each line on whitespace to build the dictionaries

Answer

Enable 'format json' on the switches and parse the output with the json.loads() function

Answer

Use ncclient get_config() against the running datastore and convert the returned XML with xmltodict