Pretty printing XML in Python

Question

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

Answer 1

Here's a Python3 solution that gets rid of the ugly newline issue (tons of whitespace), and it only uses standard libraries unlike most other implementations.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import xml.dom.minidom
import os

def pretty_print_xml_given_root(root, output_xml):
    """
    Useful for when you are editing xml data on the fly
    """
    xml_string = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml()
    xml_string = os.linesep.join([s for s in xml_string.splitlines() if s.strip()]) # remove the weird newline issue
    with open(output_xml, "w") as file_out:
        file_out.write(xml_string)

def pretty_print_xml_given_file(input_xml, output_xml):
    """
    Useful for when you want to reformat an already existing xml file
    """
    tree = ET.parse(input_xml)
    root = tree.getroot()
    pretty_print_xml_given_root(root, output_xml)

I found how to fix the common newline issue here.