Parse XML Sitemap with Python

Question

I have a sitemap like this: http://www.site.co.uk/sitemap.xml which is structured like this:

<sitemapindex>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>
    http://www.site.co.uk/drag_it/dragitsitemap_static_0.xml
    </loc>
    <lastmod>2015-07-07</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>
    http://www.site.co.uk/drag_it/dragitsitemap_alpha_0.xml
    </loc>
    <lastmod>2015-07-07</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
...

And I want to extract data from it. First of all I need to count how many <sitemap> are in the xml and then for each of them, extract the <loc> and <lastmod> data. Is there an easy way to do this in Python?

I've seen other questions like this but all of them extract for example every <loc> element inside the xml, I need to extract data individually from each element.

I've tried to use lxml with this code:

import urllib2
from lxml import etree

u = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.site.co.uk/sitemap.xml')
doc = etree.parse(u)

element_list = doc.findall('sitemap')

for element in element_list:
    url = store.findtext('loc')
    print url

but element_list is empty.

Answer 1

Using Python 3, requests, Pandas and list comprehension:

import requests
import pandas as pd
import xmltodict

url = "https://www.gov.uk/sitemap.xml"
res = requests.get(url)
raw = xmltodict.parse(res.text)

data = [[r["loc"], r["lastmod"]] for r in raw["sitemapindex"]["sitemap"]]
print("Number of sitemaps:", len(data))
df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=["links", "lastmod"])

Output:

    links                                       lastmod
0   https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_1.xml   2018-11-06T01:10:02+00:00
1   https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_2.xml   2018-11-06T01:10:02+00:00
2   https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_3.xml   2018-11-06T01:10:02+00:00
3   https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_4.xml   2018-11-06T01:10:02+00:00
4   https://www.gov.uk/sitemaps/sitemap_5.xml   2018-11-06T01:10:02+00:00

Answer 2

I chose to use Requests and BeautifulSoup libraries. I created a dictionary where the key is the url and the value is the last modified date.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

xmlDict = {}

r = requests.get("http://www.site.co.uk/sitemap.xml")
xml = r.text

soup = BeautifulSoup(xml)
sitemapTags = soup.find_all("sitemap")

print "The number of sitemaps are {0}".format(len(sitemapTags))

for sitemap in sitemapTags:
    xmlDict[sitemap.findNext("loc").text] = sitemap.findNext("lastmod").text

print xmlDict

Or with lxml:

from lxml import etree
import requests

xmlDict = {}

r = requests.get("http://www.site.co.uk/sitemap.xml")
root = etree.fromstring(r.content)
print "The number of sitemap tags are {0}".format(len(root))
for sitemap in root:
    children = sitemap.getchildren()
    xmlDict[children[0].text] = children[1].text
print xmlDict