Python prettify create xml version

Question

when I launch this code he generated xml file which contain xml version <\\?xml version="1.0" ?>, I tried exclude this line using xml_declaration=False, but error appears:

TypeError: prettify() got an unexpected keyword argument 'encoding'

How I can cut this string from my xml file ?

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from xml.dom import minidom
from lxml.etree import Element, SubElement



def prettify(templateXml):
    rough_string = ElementTree.tostring(templateXml)
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="\t")


top = Element('Options')
element = SubElement(top, 'Some ID')
element.text = ' '
element = SubElement(top, 'Test0')
element.text = 'Some text'
SubElement(top, 'Test1', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test2', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test3', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test4', {'enabled': 'true', 'Test5': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test6', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test7', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test8', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
with open("output/some_xml_file.xml", 'w') as f:
    f.write(prettify(top))

Answer 1

Issue solved following changes:

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from xml.dom import minidom
from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement


def prettify(elem):
    xml = ElementTree.tostring(elem)
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(xml)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="\t")


def strip_prologue(xml):
    if xml.startswith("<?xml"):
        return xml[xml.index(">") + 1:].lstrip()
    else:
        return xml


def generate_xml():
    top = Element('Heards')
    element = SubElement(top, 'SomeID')
    element.text = ' '
    element = SubElement(top, 'Test0')
    element.text = 'Some text'
    SubElement(top, 'Test1', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test2', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test3', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test4', {'enabled': 'true', 'Test5': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test6', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test7', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
    SubElement(top, 'Test8', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
    with open("output/some_xml_file.xml", 'w') as f:
        f.write(strip_prologue(prettify(top)))

Answer 2

Simply use lxml's prettyprint argument in tostring() . No need for minidom or even xml.etree . Python's lxml can serve as your full XML handler. And be sure to remove the space in Some ID for valid XML names for well-formedness.

import lxml.etree as et
from lxml.etree import Element, SubElement

top = Element('Options')
element = SubElement(top, 'SomeID')
element.text = ' '
element = SubElement(top, 'Test0')
element.text = 'Some text'
SubElement(top, 'Test1', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test2', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test3', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test4', {'enabled': 'true', 'Test5': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test6', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test7', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})
SubElement(top, 'Test8', {'enabled': 'true', 'Values': 'true', 'Zero': 'true'})

with open("output/some_xml_file.xml", 'wb') as f:
    f.write(et.tostring(top, xml_declaration=True, pretty_print=True, encoding="utf-8"))

Output

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<Options>
  <SomeID> </SomeID>
  <Test0>Some text</Test0>
  <Test1 Values="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test2 Values="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test3 Values="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test4 Test5="true" Zero="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test6 Values="true" Zero="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test7 Values="true" Zero="true" enabled="true"/>
  <Test8 Values="true" Zero="true" enabled="true"/>
</Options>

Answer 3

I was stuck with a similar error and until I could find a good solution to do this, I used a not-so-great method that parsed my un-indented data and used the tostring method without using minidom.

from lxml import etree

tree = lxml.etree.parse("yourfile.xml")
pretty = lxml.etree.tostring(tree, encoding="unicode", pretty_print=True)

print(pretty) 

This worked for me when I got the same error so just putting it out there.