How to POST an xml element in python

Question

Basically I have this xml element (xml.etree.ElementTree) and I want to POST it to a url. Currently I'm doing something like

xml_string = xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring(my_element)
data = urllib.urlencode({'xml': xml_string})
response = urllib2.urlopen(url, data)

I'm pretty sure that works and all, but was wondering if there is some better practice or way to do it without converting it to a string first.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If this is your own API, I would consider POSTing as application/xml. The default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, which is meant for HTML form data, not a single XML document.

req = urllib2.Request(url=url, 
                      data=xml_string, 
                      headers={'Content-Type': 'application/xml'})
urllib2.urlopen(req)

Answer 2

Here is a full example (snippet) for sending post data (xml) to an URL:

def execQualysAction(username,password,url,request_data):
  import urllib,urrlib2
  xml_output = None 
  try:
    base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password)).replace('\n', '')  
    headers = {'X-Requested-With' : 'urllib2','Content-Type': 'application/xml','Authorization': 'Basic %s' % base64string}
    req = urllib2.Request(url=url,data=request_data,headers=headers)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(req,timeout=int(TIMEOUT))
    xml_output = response.read()
    if args.verbose>1:
      print "Result of executing action request",request_data,"is:",xml_output
  except:
    xml_output = '<RESULT></RESULT>'
    traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stdout)
    print '-'*60

finally:

return xml_output