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python requests xml data

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 1 min read

Python Requests for XML Data

If you are working with API requests that return XML data, you can use Python's requests module to make HTTP requests and parse the XML response. Here are a few ways to do it:

Method 1: Using requests.get() with xml.etree.ElementTree

First, you need to import the necessary modules:


import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

Next, you can make an HTTP GET request using requests.get() and store the response in a variable:


response = requests.get('https://example.com/api/data.xml')

Then, you can parse the XML response using ET.fromstring():


root = ET.fromstring(response.content)

Now, you can access the XML elements and attributes using root.findall() and element.get():


for item in root.findall('item'):
    title = item.find('title').text
    category = item.get('category')
    print(title, category)

Method 2: Using requests.get() with lxml.etree

If you prefer to use the lxml module for XML parsing, you can modify the code above as follows:


import requests
from lxml import etree

response = requests.get('https://example.com/api/data.xml')
root = etree.fromstring(response.content)

for item in root.findall('item'):
    title = item.find('title').text
    category = item.get('category')
    print(title, category)

Note that you need to import etree from lxml instead of xml.etree.ElementTree.

Method 3: Using requests.get() with xmltodict

If you prefer to work with XML data in dictionary format, you can use the xmltodict module:


import requests
import xmltodict

response = requests.get('https://example.com/api/data.xml')
data = xmltodict.parse(response.content)

for item in data['root']['items']['item']:
    title = item['title']
    category = item['@category']
    print(title, category)

Note that you need to install the xmltodict module using pip install xmltodict.

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