[Tutor] Using xml.etree

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Hi Tutors,

I have been trying to learn how to parse XML with Python and learn how
to use xml.etree. Lots of the tutorials seem to be very long winded.

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?

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']
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