Parsing XML data

Sometimes, we will get an XML response from the server, and we have to parse the XML to extract the data. We can use the xml.etree.ElementTree module to parse the XML files.

Getting ready

We have to install the required module, xml:

pip install xml

How to do it...

Here is how we can parse XML data with XML module:

1. First import the required modules. As this script is in Python 3, make sure that you import the correct modules:

from urllib.request import urlopen 
from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse 

2. Now get the XML file with the urlopen method in the urllib module:

url = urlopen('http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/Google') 

3. Now parse the XML file with the parse method in the xml.etree.ElementTree module:

xmldoc = parse(url)

4. Now iterate and print the details in XML:

for item in xmldoc.iterfind('channel/item'): 
    title = item.findtext('title') 
    desc = item.findtext('description') 
    date = item.findtext('pubDate') 
    link = item.findtext('link')  
    print(title) 
   ...