CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxml
Jason S
Jason S

Reputation: 189866

simple output of xml from python

I need to output XML from python in a very minimalist way:

At this point I'm using print statements to explicitly print out angle-bracket tags, and the only thing really stopping me is escaping text within a tag, which I do not know how to do.

Any suggestions?

update: Is there anything like Java's StAX XMLStreamWriter for Python? I may have a large XML document to produce, and I don't need (or want) to hold the entire document in memory.

update #2: I also need to escape random unicode or non-ASCII characters in the text besides <, > and &.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3879

Answers (4)

Jason S
Jason S

Reputation: 189866

Well, it looks like SAX isn't that hard to use after all. Here's an example.

xmltest.py:

import xml.sax.xmlreader
import xml.sax.saxutils

def testJunk(file, e2content):
  attr0 = xml.sax.xmlreader.AttributesImpl({})
  x =  xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator(file)
  x.startDocument()
  x.startElement("document", attr0)

  x.startElement("element1", attr0)
  x.characters("bingo")
  x.endElement("element1")

  x.startElement("element2", attr0)
  x.characters(e2content)
  x.endElement("element2")

  x.endElement("document")
  x.endDocument()

tested:

>>> import xmltest
>>> xmltest.testJunk(open("test.xml","w"), "wham < 3!")

produces:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<document><element1>bingo</element1><element2>wham &lt; 3!</element2></document>

Upvotes: 4

Mark Tolonen
Mark Tolonen

Reputation: 178179

ElementTree comes with Python 2.6:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
root = ET.Element('root')
sub = ET.SubElement(root,'sub')
sub.text = 'Hello & Goodbye'
tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
tree.write('out.xml')
# OR
ET.dump(root)

Output

<root><sub>Hello &amp; Goodbye</sub></root>

Upvotes: 2

barti_ddu
barti_ddu

Reputation: 10309

If task is as simple, minidom may suffice. Here goes short example:

from xml.dom.minidom import Document

# create xml document
document = Document()

# create root element
root = document.createElement("root")
document.appendChild(root)

# create child element
child = document.createElement("child")
child.setAttribute("tag", "test")
root.appendChild(child)

# insert some text
atext = document.createTextNode("Foo bar")
child.appendChild(atext)

# print created xml
print(document.toprettyxml(indent="    "))

Upvotes: 2

khachik
khachik

Reputation: 28703

xml.sax.saxutils.escape(data[, entities]).

Upvotes: 1

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