Django 3 Web Development Cookbook - Fourth Edition

How it works...

The process is analogous to the JSON approach. Using the requests.get() method, we read the data from Last.fm, passing the query parameters as params. The XML content of the response is passed to the ElementTree parser from the defusedxml module, and the root node is returned.

The defusedxml module is a safer replacement for the xml module. It prevents XML bombs—a vulnerability allowing the attacker to use a few hundred bytes of XML data to occupy Gigabytes of memory.

The ElementTree nodes have the find() and findall() methods, where you can pass XPath queries to filter out specific subnodes.

The following is a table of the available XPath syntax supported by ElementTree:

XPath syntax component	Meaning
tag	This selects ...