Is this hypothetical, or does the stdlib actually have load-json and load-xml?

Above works, the <json> & <xml> imports are pulled off this remotely hosted common library - https://github.com/r3n/renclib

You'll need the Ren/C branch of Rebol 3 for this:

* repo - https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c

* pre-built binaries - http://metaeducation.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Okay, as someone who doesn't know REBOL, what is the effect of miserlou/name if the server returns XML? The string value of a top-level <name> tag?

Ah this was a different XML module than I was thinking of because this is complete DOM parser!! But even so it does produce (by default) a flat representation of the XML.

So, if for example, Github did return XML and it looked something like this (shown in Rebol console):

    >> x: load-xml {<root><name>Mr Miserlou</name><login>xxx</login></root>}
    == [
        <root> [
            <name> "Mr Miserlou"
            <login> "xxx"
        ]
    ]

So to get top-level tags it's just:

    >> second x                                                              
    == [
        <name> "Mr Miserlou"
        <login> "xxx"
    ]

Now load-json also has a flat option so that a good way to unify things. Here's an updated example showing this:

    import <json>
    import <xml>

    load-*: function [site] [
        p: open site
        content: read p
        http: query p
        close p

        data: parse http/headers/Content-Type [
              "application/json" return (load-json/flat content)
            | "application/xml"  return (second load-xml content)
        ] else [
            fail "Content-Type not recognised"
        ]

        ;; next 2 lines just turns it into a hashmap so can do:  miserlou/name
        ;; without it could have done:  miserlou/<name>
        ;;
        for-skip data 2 [data/1: to-word to-string data/1]
        make map! lock data
    ]

    miserlou: load-* https://api.github.com/users/Miserlou
    print miserlou/name

Okay, that's quite good! I'm going to see how good this can get with the Python std lib later. Probably not quite this nice.

Actually, I think I was wrong. You can get something this nice in Python. It just requires a bit more glue code in the case of JSON, and a lot more glue code in the case of XML. All told, I figure Python might 10x more code than REBOL here. I'm not sure if it's fair to hold this against Python though. It's "just" a question of libraries. And it's only fair to hold libraries against a language if the library itself would be hard to write. Which in this case I think it wouldn't.

Still neat though. Sometimes I wonder if I should learn REBOL (or Red?) or something.