Python - How to parse xml response and store a elements value in a variable?

Question

I am getting the XML response from the API call.

I need the "testId" attribute value from this response. Please help me on this.

r = requests.get( myconfig.URL_webpagetest + "?url=" + testurl + "&f=xml&k=" + myconfig.apikey_webpagetest )
xmltxt = r.content
print(xmltxt)
testId = XML(xmltxt).find("testId").text
r = requests.get("http://www.webpagetest.org/testStatus.php?f=xml&test=" + testId )

xml response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
    <statusCode>200</statusCode>
    <statusText>Ok</statusText>
    <data>
        <testId>180523_YM_054fd7d84fd4ea7aed237f87289e0c7c</testId>
        <ownerKey>dfc65d98de13c4770e528ef5b65e9629a52595e9</ownerKey>
        <jsonUrl>http://www.webpagetest.org/jsonResult.php?test=180523_YM_054fd7d84fd4ea7aed237f87289e0c7c</jsonUrl>
    </data>
</response>

The following error is produced:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/pagePerformance.py", line 52, in <module>
    testId = XML (xmltxt).find("testId").text
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'

Answer 1

Use the following to collect testId from response:-

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

response_xml_as_string = "xml response string from API"
responseXml = ET.fromstring(response_xml_as_string)
testId = responseXml.find('data').find('testId')
print testId.text

Answer 2

from lxml.etree import fromstring

string = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <response> <statusCode>200</statusCode> <statusText>Ok</statusText> <data><testId>180523_YM_054fd7d84fd4ea7aed237f87289e0c7c</testId> <ownerKey>dfc65d98de13c4770e528ef5b65e9629a52595e9</ownerKey> <jsonUrl>http://www.webpagetest.org/jsonResult.php?test=180523_YM_054fd7d84fd4ea7aed237f87289e0c7c</jsonUrl> </data> </response>'

response = fromstring(string.encode('utf-8'))
elm = response.xpath('/response/data/testId').pop()
testId = elm.text

This way you can search for any element within the xml from the root/parent element via the XPATH.

Side Note: I don't particular like using the pop method to remove the item from a single item list. So if anyone else has a better way to do it please let me know. So far I've consider:

1) elm = next(iter(response.xpath('/response/data/testId')))

2) simply leaving it in a list so it can use as a stararg