Parsing XML from API response

Question

I've been trying for some hours to grab the response from the imgur API. I got the XML in the terminal, but I don't know how to grab it and parse it. Here's my code.

c = pycurl.Curl()
values = [
          ("key", "Super Secret API Number"),
          ("image", (c.FORM_FILE, "pic.jpg"))]

c.setopt(c.URL, "http://api.imgur.com/2/upload.xml")
c.setopt(c.HTTPPOST, values)
c.perform()
c.close()

I'm a big noob with python, this is my first time. Python virgin. I read that you can parse the xml with ElementTree, but I can't find any cool documentation.

Hope you can help me. Thanks.

You could try using the nice python requests github.com/kennethreitz/requests when building http requests :) — user221209
– user221209, Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 23:38

RanRag · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-24 23:33:43Z

3

Store the response from imgur-api into a file.Than need to use a xml parser to parse the xml response/file you are getting from Imgur-API.

There are lots of option available like lxml or BeautifulSoup.

Here is an example of how to use lxml with XPath expressions.

from lxml import etree


xml = """<foo>baz!</foo>"""

>>> xml = """<foo>baz!</foo>"""
>>> xp = etree.fromstring(xml)
>>> values = xp.xpath("//foo/text()")
>>> values
['baz!']

If you need to parse a xml file:

# parse from file
et = etree.parse(source_xml)
value = et.xpath("your xpath xpr here")

If you need to parse directly from url

# parse from URL
etree.parse("http://example.com/somefile.xml")

For, XPath use firefox's firebug extension or install firepath

edited Jan 24, 2012 at 23:33

answered Jan 24, 2012 at 23:22

RanRag

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2 Comments

Alejandro Ar Over a year ago

Thanks a lot. Didn't think about that, sounds logic.

RanRag Over a year ago

@AlejandroAr: xpath is quite logical you can even try using cssselect with lxml. Use firebug to copy csspath of required element.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:28:31Z

1

When I started using the included ElementTree module I found the documentation lacking good examples (currently there are only 3, and only one of those shows anything immediately practical).

I've answered a couple of questions here on SO related to lxml/ElementTree, and I usually see people getting stuck trying to write these weird list comprehensions to deal with something XPath handles in one line much more clearly:

If you have a more specific question, please post some source XML and desired effect.

I hope this helps,

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:28

CommunityBot

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answered Jan 24, 2012 at 23:42

Zach Young

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