The headers are important. Most SOAP requests will not work without the correct headers. application/soap+xml is probably the more correct header to use (but the weatherservice prefers text/xml
This will return the response as a string of xml - you would then need to parse that xml.
For simplicity I have included the request as plain text. But best practise would be to store this as a template, then you can load it using jinja2 (for example) - and also pass in variables.
For example:
from jinja2 import Environment, PackageLoader
env = Environment(loader=PackageLoader('myapp', 'templates'))
template = env.get_template('soaprequests/WeatherSericeRequest.xml')
body = template.render()
Some people have mentioned the suds library. Suds is probably the more correct way to be interacting with SOAP, but I often find that it panics a little when you have WDSLs that are badly formed (which, TBH, is more likely than not when you're dealing with an institution that still uses SOAP ;) ).
You can do the above with suds like so:
from suds.client import Client
url="http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?WSDL"
client = Client(url)
print client ## shows the details of this service
result = client.service.GetWeatherInformation()
print result
Note: when using suds, you will almost always end up needing to use the doctor!
Finally, a little bonus for debugging SOAP; TCPdump is your friend. On Mac, you can run TCPdump like so:
sudo tcpdump -As 0
This can be helpful for inspecting the requests that actually go over the wire.
The above two code snippets are also available as gists: