Using lxml to parse the Microsoft API translation result from the xml

gistfile1.txt

#!/usr/bin/python

from lxml import etree

def get_text_from_msmt_xml (xml):
    """Parse the xml string returned by the MS machine translation API, and return just the text"""

    text = []
    doc = etree.fromstring(xml)
    for elem in doc.xpath('/foo:string', namespaces={'foo': 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/'}):
        if elem.text:
            elem_text = ' '.join(elem.text.split())
            if len(elem_text) > 0:
                text.append(elem_text)

    return ' '.join(text)