Writing XML from Python : Python equivalent of .NET XmlTextWriter?

Question

I have some IronPython code which makes use of XmlTextWriter which allows me to write code like

self.writer = System.Xml.XmlTextWriter(filename, None)
self.writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented
self.writer.WriteStartElement(name)
self.writer.WriteString(str(text))
self.writer.WriteEndElement()

...

self.writer.Close()

I would like to make my code portable across Python implementations (CPython, IronPython and Jython). Is there a streaming Python XML writer I can use for this without needing to use either print statements, or to construct a whole DOM tree before writing it out to file?

Is this the same thing as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019895/serialize-python-dictionary-to-xml — S.Lott, Jun 20 '09 at 20:19
@S.Lott No it isn't. The question you refer to is about serialising Python data structures directly to XML. This question is about producing a specific XML form from Python. — Rob Smallshire, Jun 18 '11 at 05:59

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 21 '10 at 18:56

I wrote a module named loxun to do just that: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/loxun/. It runs with CPython 2.5 and Jython 2.5, but I never tried it with IronPython.

Example usage:

with open("...", "wb") as out:
  xml = XmlWriter(out)
  xml.addNamespace("xhtml", "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml")
  xml.startTag("xhtml:html")
  xml.startTag("xhtml:body")
  xml.text("Hello world!")
  xml.tag("xhtml:img", {"src": "smile.png", "alt": ":-)"})
  xml.endTag()
  xml.endTag()
  xml.close()

And the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xhtml:html xlmns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <xhtml:body>
    Hello world!
    <xhtml:img alt=":-)" src="smile.png" />
  </xhtml:body>
</xhtml:html>

Among other features, it detects missalligned tags while you write, uses a streaming API with a small memory footprint, supports Unicode and allows to disable pretty printing.

Sasha Chedygov · Answer 2 · 2009-06-20T21:19:43.340

2

I've never used the .NET implementation you're talking about, but it sounds like the closest you're going to get is Python's SAX parser (specifically, the XMLGenerator class -- some sample code here).

edited Jun 20 '09 at 21:19

answered Jun 20 '09 at 20:14

Sasha Chedygov

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Specifically, xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator, which is part of sax but not really a parser. – Matthew Flaschen Jun 20 '09 at 21:16

Bill Zeller · Answer 3 · 2009-06-21T04:00:36.150

2

I wrote a tool to facilitate XML generation from Python (code and tutorial)

edited Jun 21 '09 at 04:00

answered Jun 21 '09 at 03:54

Bill Zeller

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"I a tool"? What does that mean? ;) – Sasha Chedygov Jun 21 '09 at 03:57
Most elegant. Can you provide an example of how this would be used in the case where I don't know the element names until run time? – Rob Smallshire Jun 21 '09 at 11:33
It assumes the element names are known so it sounds like it doesn't solve your problem. (Well, you could write something like x = XMLegant() element_name = "root" el = getattr(x, element_name) but that seems to defeat the point.) – Bill Zeller Jun 21 '09 at 20:06

Writing XML from Python : Python equivalent of .NET XmlTextWriter?

3 Answers3