How to fetch XML with Fetch API

Currently, Fetch API doesn't support fetching XML natively (so no native XML parser), but there are workarounds.

We can use the built-in text() parser and parse the resulted strings into XML using a custom XML parser. In the example below I choose xml2js parser, I recommend reading the docs first.

import fetch from 'isomorphic-unfetch'
import xml2js from 'xml2js'

const parser = new xml2js.Parser()

async function getXMLfromURL(url) {
	try {
		const response = await fetch(url)
		const content = await response.text()
		const data = await parser.parseStringPromise(content)
	
		return data
	} catch (e) {
		console.log({e})
	}
}

getXMLfromURL('https://example.com/api')

If you want to run the following code in Node.js easily (with ES modules supported) I recommend using esm package like so:

$ npm i esm --save-dev

And you either run your index.js file directly from node:

$ node -r esm index.js

Or you can create a script inside package.json file that does the same thing

"scripts": {
	"dev": "node -r esm index.js"
}

Further reading

How to fetch XML with fetch api

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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37693982/how-to-fetch-xml-with-fetch-api