XML parsing in Python

#Python code to illustrate parsing of XML files
# importing the required modules
import csv
import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

def loadRSS():

    # url of rss feed
    url = 'http://www.hindustantimes.com/rss/topnews/rssfeed.xml'

    # creating HTTP response object from given url
    resp = requests.get(url)

    # saving the xml file
    with open('topnewsfeed.xml', 'wb') as f:
        f.write(resp.content)
        

def parseXML(xmlfile):

    # create element tree object
    tree = ET.parse(xmlfile)

    # get root element
    root = tree.getroot()

    # create empty list for news items
    newsitems = []

    # iterate news items
    for item in root.findall('./channel/item'):

        # empty news dictionary
        news = {}

        # iterate child elements of item
        for child in item:

            # special checking for namespace object content:media
            if child.tag == '{http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/}content':
                news['media'] = child.attrib['url']
            else:
                news[child.tag] = child.text.encode('utf8')

        # append news dictionary to news items list
        newsitems.append(news)
    
    # return news items list
    return newsitems


def savetoCSV(newsitems, filename):

    # specifying the fields for csv file
    fields = ['guid', 'title', 'pubDate', 'description', 'link', 'media']

    # writing to csv file
    with open(filename, 'w') as csvfile:

        # creating a csv dict writer object
        writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames = fields)

        # writing headers (field names)
        writer.writeheader()

        # writing data rows
        writer.writerows(newsitems)

    
def main():
    # load rss from web to update existing xml file
    loadRSS()

    # parse xml file
    newsitems = parseXML('topnewsfeed.xml')

    # store news items in a csv file
    savetoCSV(newsitems, 'topnews.csv')
    
    
if __name__ == "__main__":

    # calling main function
    main()