Question

I’m using the url-retrieve-synchronously function and it returns a buffer which contains the response. I’m wondering if there’s a non-hacky way to get the body of the response and to be able to pass it to xml-parse-region.

Is there an xml-parse-from-url function? how do I parse the response from url-retrieve?

Answer 1

In identica-mode.el (licensed under the GNU GPL version 2) there’s a function that will use url-retrieve and pass it to the xml parser and returned the parsed response:

(defun identica-get-response-body (&optional buffer)
  "Extract HTTP response body from HTTP response, parse it as XML, and return a XML tree as list.
`buffer' may be a buffer or the name of an existing buffer.
 If `buffer' is omitted, current-buffer is parsed.

Removed the call to `identica-clean-response-body'."
  (or buffer
      (setq buffer (current-buffer)))
  (set-buffer buffer)
  (set-buffer-multibyte t)
  (let ((start (save-excursion
         (goto-char (point-min))
         (and (re-search-forward "<\?xml" (point-max) t)
              (match-beginning 0)))))
    ;;(identica-clean-response-body) ; necessary for identica, cleaned up some weird characters
    (and start
         (xml-parse-region start (point-max)))))