Use xml.etree.ElementTree to print nicely formatted xml files [duplicate]

Answer 1

You could use the library lxml (Note top level link is now spam) , which is a superset of ElementTree. Its tostring() method includes a parameter pretty_print - for example:

>>> print(etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True))
<root>
  <child1/>
  <child2/>
  <child3/>
</root>

Answer 2

You can use the function toprettyxml() from xml.dom.minidom in order to do that:

def prettify(elem):
    """Return a pretty-printed XML string for the Element.
    """
    rough_string = ElementTree.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="\t")

The idea is to print your Element in a string, parse it using minidom and convert it again in XML using the toprettyxml function.

Source: http://pymotw.com/2/xml/etree/ElementTree/create.html