Pretty printing XML in Python

Question

What is the best way (or are the various ways) to pretty print XML in Python?

Answer 1

As others pointed out, lxml has a pretty printer built in.

Be aware though that by default it changes CDATA sections to normal text, which can have nasty results.

Here's a Python function that preserves the input file and only changes the indentation (notice the strip_cdata=False). Furthermore it makes sure the output uses UTF-8 as encoding instead of the default ASCII (notice the encoding='utf-8'):

from lxml import etree

def prettyPrintXml(xmlFilePathToPrettyPrint):
    assert xmlFilePathToPrettyPrint is not None
    parser = etree.XMLParser(resolve_entities=False, strip_cdata=False)
    document = etree.parse(xmlFilePathToPrettyPrint, parser)
    document.write(xmlFilePathToPrettyPrint, pretty_print=True, encoding='utf-8')

Example usage:

prettyPrintXml('some_folder/some_file.xml')