Extracting an element from XML with Python3? - xml-parsing

Question

I am trying to write a Python 3 script where I am querying a web api and receiving an XML response. The response looks like this –
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ipinfo>
<ip_address>4.2.2.2</ip_address>
<ip_type>Mapped</ip_type>
<anonymizer_status/>
<Network>
<organization>level 3 communications inc.</organization>
<OrganizationData>
<home>false</home>
<organization_type>Telecommunications</organization_type>
<naics_code>518219</naics_code>
<isic_code>J6311</isic_code>
</OrganizationData>
<carrier>level 3 communications</carrier>
<asn>3356</asn>
<connection_type>tx</connection_type>
<line_speed>high</line_speed>
<ip_routing_type>fixed</ip_routing_type>
<Domain>
<tld>net</tld>
<sld>bbnplanet</sld>
</Domain>
</Network>
<Location>
<continent>north america</continent>
<CountryData>
<country>united states</country>
<country_code>us</country_code>
<country_cf>99</country_cf>
</CountryData>
<region>southwest</region>
<StateData>
<state>california</state>
<state_code>ca</state_code>
<state_cf>88</state_cf>
</StateData>
<dma>803</dma>
<msa>31100</msa>
<CityData>
<city>san juan capistrano</city>
<postal_code>92675</postal_code>
<time_zone>-8</time_zone>
<area_code>949</area_code>
<city_cf>77</city_cf>
</CityData>
<latitude>33.499</latitude>
<longitude>-117.662</longitude>
</Location>
</ipinfo>
This is the code I have so far –
import urllib.request
import urllib.error
import sys
import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
…
try:
xml = urllib.request.urlopen(targetURL, data=None)
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
print("HTTP error: " + str(e) + " URL: " + targetURL)
sys.exit()
tree = etree.parse(xml)
root = tree.getroot()
The API query works and through the debugger I can see all of the information inside the ‘root’ variable. My issue is that I have not been able to figure out how to extract something like the ASN (<asn></asn>) from the returned XML. I’ve been beating my head against this for a day with a whole wide variety of finds, findalls and all other sorts of methods but not been able to crack this. I think I have reached the point where I cannot see the wood for all the trees and every example I have found on the internet doesn’t seem to help. Can someone show me a code snippet which can extract the contents of a XML element from inside the tree structure?
Many thanks
Tim

Answer 1

I would recommend using Beautiful Soup.
It's a very powerful when it comes to extracting data from xml-code.
Example:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(targetURL)
soup.find_all('asn') #Would return all the <asn></asn> tags found!