Pretty printing XML in Python

Question

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

Answer 1

If you have xmllint you can spawn a subprocess and use it. xmllint --format pretty-prints its input XML to standard output.

Note that this method uses an program external to python, which makes it sort of a hack.

def pretty_print_xml(xml):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(
        ['xmllint', '--format', '/dev/stdin'],
        stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
        stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
    )
    (output, error_output) = proc.communicate(xml);
    return output

print(pretty_print_xml(data))