I'm no expert on these things... But generally what I want out of a data stream is a set of name/value pairs. That's it. I really don't understand why, but t

I'm no expert on these things... But generally what I want out of a data stream is a set of name/value pairs. That's it. I really don't understand why, but trying to get those name/value pairs from an xml based api is always an adventure. Well - I know why. It's because everyone structures their data differently when they create xml. Sometimes the name I'm after will be a node name. Sometimes it will be a value of a text node. Sometime the value that properly maps to that name will be a textnode 3 layers deep, sometimes it will be an attribute value. I'm still a newb but I've worked with about 8 different apis now. For the json apis I wrote one recursive function that worked on all of them to get the data I wanted... It was about 8 lines of code. For the XML apis, I STILL haven't figured out how to write a recursive function which works for ONE of them, let alone all of them. (while relying on python minidom to do the actual parsing for me).