How to use XML from RESTful web services using Django / Python?

Question

Should I use PyXML or what's in the standard library?

Answer 1

ElementTree is provided as part of the standard Python libraries. ElementTree is pure python, and cElementTree is a faster implementation of C:

# Try to use the C implementation first, falling back to python try: from xml.etree import cElementTree as ElementTree except ImportError, e: from xml.etree import ElementTree 

Here is a usage example where I consume xml from a RESTful web service:

 def find(*args, **kwargs): """Find a book in the collection specified""" search_args = [('access_key', api_key),] if not is_valid_collection(kwargs['collection']): return None kwargs.pop('collection') for key in kwargs: # Only the first keword is honored if kwargs[key]: search_args.append(('index1', key)) search_args.append(('value1', kwargs[key])) break url = urllib.basejoin(api_url, '%s.xml' % 'books') data = urllib.urlencode(search_args) req = urllib2.urlopen(url, data) rdata = [] chunk = 'xx' while chunk: chunk = req.read() if chunk: rdata.append(chunk) tree = ElementTree.fromstring(''.join(rdata)) results = [] for i, elem in enumerate(tree.getiterator('BookData')): results.append( {'isbn': elem.get('isbn'), 'isbn13': elem.get('isbn13'), 'title': elem.find('Title').text, 'author': elem.find('AuthorsText').text, 'publisher': elem.find('PublisherText').text,} ) return results 

Answer 2

I always prefer to use the standard library whenever possible. ElementTree is well known among pythonists, so you can find many examples. Parts of it have also been optimized in C, so it is pretty fast.

http://docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html

Answer 3

There's also BeautifulSoup , which may have an API. Here is an example of how you can extract all the tweets that were used on the Twitter Public Timeline:

 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup import urllib url = urllib.urlopen('http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.xml').read() favorited = [] soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(url) statuses = soup.findAll('status') for status in statuses: if status.find('favorited').contents != [u'false']: favorited.append(status)