There is nothing wrong with your code. Maybe it is better to use find() to get the <geo> tag. If you have an XSD schema you can use generateDS http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/generateDS.html to have a python parser.
But if you can use the JSON API... much simpler. mic 2011/9/19 Chris Rowson <christopherrow...@gmail.com>: > Anybody using xml.etree? > > I asked this question over at the Python tutors group but it seems > that few people there had experience of it. > > I'm trying to access a UK postcode API at www.uk-postcodes.com to take > a UK postcode and return the lat/lng of the postcode. This is what the > XML looks like: http://www.uk-postcodes.com/postcode/HU11AA.xml > > The function below returns a dict with the xml tag as a key and the > text as a value. Is this a correct way to use xml.etree? Is there a > better way of doing this? > > Thanks in advance! > > Chris > > > def ukpostcodesapi(postcode): > import urllib > import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree > > baseURL='http://www.uk-postcodes.com/' > geocodeRequest='postcode/'+postcode+'.xml' > > #grab the xml > tree=etree.parse(urllib.urlopen(baseURL+geocodeRequest)) > root=tree.getroot() > results={} > for child in root[1]: #here's the geo tag > results.update({child.tag:child.text}) #build a dict > containing the geocode data > return results > > #example usage (testing the function) > results = ukpostcodesapi('hu11aa') > print results['lat']+' '+results['lng'] >
