Retrieve synonyms of gene ontology (GO) terms

go_fetch.py

import urllib, sys
from xml.etree import cElementTree as ElementTree

def get_go_name(go_id):
    sys.stdout.write("GO"+go_id+"\t"),
    #get the GO entry as XML
    xml = urllib.urlopen("http://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO/GTerm?id=GO:"+go_id+"&format=oboxml")
    #open in cElementTree, for fast XML parsing
    for event, element in ElementTree.iterparse(xml):
        #need to make sure we are getting the name contained within the 'term' entry
        if element.tag == 'term':
            for child in element.getchildren():
                #this is the name of the GO ID in the URL above.
                if child.tag == 'name':
                    sys.stdout.write(child.text),
                if child.tag == 'synonym':
                    for c2 in child.getchildren():
                        if c2.tag == 'synonym_text':
                            sys.stdout.write("\t"+c2.text),
    print('')

get_go_name('0044225')