Writing XML files with Python

Question

I have created an XML document with the following contents.

<books>
  <book id="1">
    <title>Title01</title>
    <authors/>
    <pages>
      <page>Page01</page>
      <page>Page02</page>
      <page>Page03</page>
      <page>Page04</page>
      <page>Page05</page>
    </pages>
  </book>
  <book id="2">
    <title>Title02</title>
    <authors/>
    <pages>
      <page>Page01</page>
      <page>Page02</page>
      <page>Page03</page>
      <page>Page04</page>
      <page>Page05</page>
    </pages>
  </book>
</books>

I then use a Python script to split up and write the individual books into separate files;however, the resulting files are not XML files because they do not have the XML declaration. Is there a way of creating XML files in Python?

The idea is to ensure that each file has the XML declaration as show below.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
  <book id="1">
    <title>Title01</title>
    <authors/>
    <pages>
      <page>Page01</page>
      <page>Page02</page>
      <page>Page03</page>
      <page>Page04</page>
      <page>Page05</page>
    </pages>
  </book>

Duplicate of [Best XML writing tool for python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/56229/best-xml-writing-tool-for-python) — Mike Pennington, May 24 '11 at 11:10
The XML declaration is not required for XML well-formedness (see http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#NT-prolog). Do you have another reason for needing it? — Paul Butcher, May 24 '11 at 11:22
@Paul Butcher: Thank you for the response. I was rather hoping that I could have declaration to explicitly specify the encoding used. Also, I might find myself using the linux "find" command at some point to check if the file type is XML. — lightonphiri, May 24 '11 at 11:34

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 24 '11 at 11:44

0

Why don't you write the xml declaration to each book file before you write the book entry?

answered May 24 '11 at 11:44

joel goldstick

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I suppose this will do for now. Thank you very much. – lightonphiri May 24 '11 at 12:12
great! what? 0 for the answer you liked? – joel goldstick May 24 '11 at 13:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 24 '11 at 11:49

0

Encode your files in UTF-8 instead of some legacy encoding like ISO-8859-1. Then you don't need an XML declaration.

answered May 24 '11 at 11:49

John Machin

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Daren Thomas · Answer 3 · 2011-05-24T11:59:50.713

0

You should look into the xml.etree.ElementTree module. The link is for Python 3, but it was included way before that. I use it in Python 2.5, so you should be ok.

Also, I have had good results with xml.dom.minidom. Once you have built a Document (by adding elements with createElement('ELEM_NAME'), you just write it to a stream with mydoc.toprettyxml().

edited May 24 '11 at 11:59

answered May 24 '11 at 11:53

Daren Thomas

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Writing XML files with Python

3 Answers3