Easiest way to send XML via HTTP requests in Python?

Question

Is there a preferred python module that could help me to send XML through a HTTP request and be able to parse the returning XML?

Solution

One way would be to use urllib2:

r = urllib2.Request("http://example.com", data="<xml>spam</xml>",
                     headers={'Content-Type': 'application/xml'})
u = urllib2.urlopen(r)
response = u.read()

Note that you have to set the content-type header, or the request will be sent application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

If that's too complicated for you, then you can also use the requests library.

For parsing the response lxml is a great library, but elementtree will also do.