Using the PMC API and parsing its XML output

PMC_API_request.py

# imports
import pandas as pd
import os
import ftplib as FTP
import urllib
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import subprocess

# next line is the request url that I was using; everything after the first ? is the query terms.
# there's a place somewhere on pubmed (can't remember where) where you can get the string to use there.
requestURL = "https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=PMC&%22open%20access%22[filter]&term=%22western%20blot%22[Figure/Table%20Caption]&usehistory=y&retmax=50000"
# next line does the request and reads in the xml-formatted output
root = ET.parse(urllib.request.urlopen(requestURL)).getroot()
# in my case, I was just looking for the 'IdList/Id' tag based on my search, so I pulled that out.
id_list = []
IDs = root.findall('IdList/Id')
for ID in IDs:
    id_list.append(ID.text)