Really? An article on downloading and saving an XML file? “Just use requests mate!”, I hear you all saying. Well, it’s not that simple. At least, it wasn’t as straight forward as that for a beginner like me. Here’s why. Show Parsing is Different to SavingFor sure, experts and beginners alike will have used requests to pull down the contents of a web page. Generally it’s for the purpose of parsing or scraping that page for specific data elements. What if you wanted to actually save that web page to your local drive? Things get slightly different. You’re no longer just reading a text rendered version of the page, you’re trying to save the actual page in its original state. This is what I found slightly confusing. I wasn’t dealing with a Why XML?I’m talking XML here because I was/am trying to download the actual XML file for an RSS feed I wanted to parse offline. For those of you playing at home, this is for our PyBites Code Challenge 17 (hint hint!). Why Download when you can just Parse the feed itself?Good question! It’s about best practice and just being nice. In the case of our code challenge (PCC17), how many times are you going to run your Py script while building the app to test if it works? Every time you run that script
with your This generates unnecessary traffic and load on that server which is a pretty crappy thing to do! The nicer and Pythonic thing to do is to have a separate script that does the request once and saves the required data to a local file. Your primary scraping or analysis script then references the local file. Get to the code already!Alright, check it out:
It all looks pretty familiar so I won’t go into detail on the usual suspects. What I’m doing in this code is the following:
Here’s why it was a learning exercise for me: As I open/create the feed.xml file, I’m using
the “Mode” If you fail to choose the binary mode then you’ll get an error:
This confused the hell out of me and resulted in me wasting time trying to convert the requests response data to different formats or writing to the external file one line at a time (which meant I lost formatting anyway!). The binary mode is required to write the actual content of the XML page to your external file in the original format. Speaking of content. Notice in the final Using the
ConclusionThis is one of those things that we all just get used to doing. Pulling a feed down and saving it to a file is something Bob has done a thousand times so no longer has to give it any extra thought. For me, however,
this took an entire night* of playing around because I’d never done it before and was assuming (silly me!) that the parsing code I’ve been using I also found that I had to scour a ton of StackOverflow posts and other documentation just to get my head wrapped around this concept correctly. So with this finally cleared up, it’s time to go attack some feeds! Keep Calm and Code in Python! Julian *Not really an entire night. I do need my beauty sleep! How do I download an XML file in Python?As I open/create the feed.. Pulling the xml content down using requests. get .. Using a with statement to create a file called feed. xml . (If the file exists it'll be overwritten).. Writing the contents of the requests response into the file feed. xml .. How do I retrieve an XML file from a URL?How to read XML data from a URL. Copy the Books. ... . Open Visual Studio.. Create a new Visual C# Console Application. ... . Specify the using directive on the System. ... . Create an instance of the XmlTextReader class, and specify the URL. ... . Read through the XML. ... . Inspect the nodes. ... . Inspect the attributes.. How do I download an XML file from a website?Simply click the File button (the 3 lines), and click Save Page As. For example, I went to xml-sitemaps.com/sitemap.xml and clicked Save Page As. It saved as XML to my local machine and loaded as such.
How parse XML URL in Python?In order to parse XML document you need to have the entire document in memory.. To parse XML document.. Import xml.dom.minidom.. Use the function “parse” to parse the document ( doc=xml.dom.minidom.parse (file name);. Call the list of XML tags from the XML document using code (=doc.getElementsByTagName( “name of xml tags”). |