XML row structure in one row

Question

Strange error occured, got a XML-file emailed to me which was wrongly formated. The info in the file was all in one row.

Like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><Text><otherText><printdate>2015-02-08</printdate>

Does anyone know a quick way to fix this by using a python script or something that has had the same error?

I want to make the file like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<Text>
<OtherText>
<Name>VH2</Name>
<PrintDate>2015-02-05</PrintDate>

Thanks!

How abount simply replacing `><` with `>\n<`? – sloth Feb 13 '15 at 08:40 — sloth, Feb 13 '15 at 08:40

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

0

It seems you want to print pretty, if you look into other XML libraries, such as lxml, it support pretty print.

import lxml.etree as etree

x = etree.parse("filename")
print etree.tostring(x, pretty_print = True)

However, you can also try this: Pretty printing XML in Python

edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

Community

1
1

answered Feb 13 '15 at 08:42

Cui Heng

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Thank for you answer, although i get error message XMLSyntaxError: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document, line 1, column 665 – SterlinkArcher Feb 13 '15 at 09:51
I'll look into it and see if I can find a solution, although it seems to work on some files @Cui Heng – SterlinkArcher Feb 13 '15 at 09:51

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '15 at 09:57

If the XML is well formed this snippet will work

#!/usr/bin/python
import xml.dom.minidom

def main():
    ugly_xml   = open('ugly.xml', 'r')
    pretty_xml = open('pretty.xml', 'w')

    xmll = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(ugly_xml.read())
    pretty_xml.write(xmll.toprettyxml()) 

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

XML row structure in one row

2 Answers2