Python download xml file from url

An article on downloading and saving an XML file? For sure, experts and beginners alike will have used requests to pull down the contents of a web page. What if you wanted to actually save that web page to your local drive?

Things get slightly different. This is what I found slightly confusing. For those of you playing at home, this is for our PyBites Code Challenge 17 hint hint! 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 requests. 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.

XML is good because it is human-readable and machine-readable. It strives for simplicity, generality, and usability. An example of XML is shown in the image below. First, XML is built with tags. There will be a start-tag which will look like note, the word could be anything. The end-tag for this tag would then be.

The final thing we need to understand for this tutorial are attributes. If there are any attributes, they will be held within a tag. For instance, in the image above, we can see the line:. This entire line is the tag. The element is name and the attributes are type , sortindex , and value. Think of parsing as translating one piece of data into another kind of data. You can Parse XML data with many, many languages. Even within Python, there are more than one modules available for parsing XML data.

Improve this question. Akash Bachu. Akash Bachu Akash Bachu 47 7 7 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Accessing your web service url seem not to be working.

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