Can I download XML data from the web and save, in as CSV or TXT delimitation?

[Joel Goldstick]

>
>
> Well, yes, I was originally trying to do it it R, but I couldn't get it working, so I thought I'd try to do it in Python.  That was a sample R script.  Can I do essentially the same thing in Python?  Can I read the XML from the web?
> http://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/report_format/latest-July-2015-New-Format.xml
>
> Parse it, or clean it, or whatever, and save it as a CSV or TXT?  Is that possible?
>
> Thanks.

Of course you can

1. read a file from a website using python urllib modules or requests
module (3rd party but simpler)
2. There are several xml parsers.  I haven't experienced them, so
google is your friend
3. python has csv reader and writer modules


-- 
Joel Goldstick
http://joelgoldstick.com