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 <file> 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))

Answer 2

An alternative if you don't want to have to reparse, there is the xmlpp.py library with the get_pprint() function. It worked nice and smoothly for my use cases, without having to reparse to an lxml ElementTree object.

Answer 3

If for some reason you can't get your hands on any of the Python modules that other users mentioned, I suggest the following solution for Python 2.7:

import subprocess

def makePretty(filepath):
  cmd = "xmllint --format " + filepath
  prettyXML = subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell = True)
  with open(filepath, "w") as outfile:
    outfile.write(prettyXML)

As far as I know, this solution will work on Unix-based systems that have the xmllint package installed.

Answer 4

I solved this with some lines of code, opening the file, going trough it and adding indentation, then saving it again. I was working with small xml files, and did not want to add dependencies, or more libraries to install for the user. Anyway, here is what I ended up with:

    f = open(file_name,'r')
    xml = f.read()
    f.close()

    #Removing old indendations
    raw_xml = ''        
    for line in xml:
        raw_xml += line

    xml = raw_xml

    new_xml = ''
    indent = '    '
    deepness = 0

    for i in range((len(xml))):

        new_xml += xml[i]   
        if(i<len(xml)-3):

            simpleSplit = xml[i:(i+2)] == '><'
            advancSplit = xml[i:(i+3)] == '></'        
            end = xml[i:(i+2)] == '/>'    
            start = xml[i] == '<'

            if(advancSplit):
                deepness += -1
                new_xml += '\n' + indent*deepness
                simpleSplit = False
                deepness += -1
            if(simpleSplit):
                new_xml += '\n' + indent*deepness
            if(start):
                deepness += 1
            if(end):
                deepness += -1

    f = open(file_name,'w')
    f.write(new_xml)
    f.close()

It works for me, perhaps someone will have some use of it :)

Answer 5

from lxml import etree
import xml.dom.minidom as mmd

xml_root = etree.parse(xml_fiel_path, etree.XMLParser())

def print_xml(xml_root):
    plain_xml = etree.tostring(xml_root).decode('utf-8')
    urgly_xml = ''.join(plain_xml .split())
    good_xml = mmd.parseString(urgly_xml)
    print(good_xml.toprettyxml(indent='    ',))

It's working well for the xml with Chinese!

Answer 6

I tried to edit "ade"s answer above, but Stack Overflow wouldn't let me edit after I had initially provided feedback anonymously. This is a less buggy version of the function to pretty-print an ElementTree.

def indent(elem, level=0, more_sibs=False):
    i = "\n"
    if level:
        i += (level-1) * '  '
    num_kids = len(elem)
    if num_kids:
        if not elem.text or not elem.text.strip():
            elem.text = i + "  "
            if level:
                elem.text += '  '
        count = 0
        for kid in elem:
            indent(kid, level+1, count < num_kids - 1)
            count += 1
        if not elem.tail or not elem.tail.strip():
            elem.tail = i
            if more_sibs:
                elem.tail += '  '
    else:
        if level and (not elem.tail or not elem.tail.strip()):
            elem.tail = i
            if more_sibs:
                elem.tail += '  '