如何删除空xml标记中的多余空间

Question

I have a xml file where I'm looking for specific tag (for example: tag <x> ) and if I find him I replace/update its value to specific text (for example: test ).

Python version 3.5.0.

Sample xml file:

<root>
 <a/>
 <b>0</b>
 <c/>
 <x>some value</x>
</root>

This is my code:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as et

datafile = 'input.xml'     # path to the source xml file
datafile_out = 'output.xml'    # path to the updated xml
tree = et.parse(datafile)
tree.find('.//x').text ='TEST'  # find <x> tag and write there value "TEST"
tree.write(datafile_out)    #generating updated xml file

And this is my output:

<root>
 <a />
 <b>0</b>
 <c />
 <x>TEST</x>
</root>

Everything works as expected.

But my problem is with extra space in empty tags: <a /> between tag name "a" and "slash" which wasn't present in input xml file.

I'm working with quite big xml files with a lot of empty tags so every extra space makes this files a lot bigger.

Is there any possible way to stop ElementTree.write() to add that extra space?

Note: I would like to use build in Python modules and not install third parties solutions.

Many thanks for your advices!

Answer 1

Have you tried using regular expressions.

As an example:

yourXmlAsString.replaceAll(">\\s*<", "><"); Would remove all whitespaces between every XML element.