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)