Pretty printing XML in Python

Question

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

Answer 1

Take a look at the vkbeautify module.

It is a python version of my very popular javascript/nodejs plugin with the same name. It can pretty-print/minify XML, JSON and CSS text. Input and output can be string/file in any combinations. It is very compact and doesn't have any dependency.

Examples:

import vkbeautify as vkb

vkb.xml(text)                       
vkb.xml(text, 'path/to/dest/file')  
vkb.xml('path/to/src/file')        
vkb.xml('path/to/src/file', 'path/to/dest/file') 

Answer 2

I wrote a solution to walk through an existing ElementTree and use text/tail to indent it as one typically expects.

def prettify(element, indent='  '):
    queue = [(0, element)]  # (level, element)
    while queue:
        level, element = queue.pop(0)
        children = [(level + 1, child) for child in list(element)]
        if children:
            element.text = '\n' + indent * (level+1)  # for child open
        if queue:
            element.tail = '\n' + indent * queue[0][0]  # for sibling open
        else:
            element.tail = '\n' + indent * (level-1)  # for parent close
        queue[0:0] = children  # prepend so children come before siblings

Answer 3

You can try this variation...

Install BeautifulSoup and the backend lxml (parser) libraries:

user$ pip3 install lxml bs4

Process your XML document:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

with open('/path/to/file.xml', 'r') as doc: 
    for line in doc: 
        print(BeautifulSoup(line, 'lxml-xml').prettify())  

Answer 4

lxml is recent, updated, and includes a pretty print function

import lxml.etree as etree

x = etree.parse("filename")
print etree.tostring(x, pretty_print=True)

Check out the lxml tutorial: http://lxml.de/tutorial.html

Answer 5

Here's my (hacky?) solution to get around the ugly text node problem.

uglyXml = doc.toprettyxml(indent='  ')

text_re = re.compile('>\n\s+([^<>\s].*?)\n\s+</', re.DOTALL)    
prettyXml = text_re.sub('>\g<1></', uglyXml)

print prettyXml

The above code will produce:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<issues>
  <issue>
    <id>1</id>
    <title>Add Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 solution files</title>
    <details>We need Visual Studio 2005/2008 project files for Windows.</details>
  </issue>
</issues>

Instead of this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<issues>
  <issue>
    <id>
      1
    </id>
    <title>
      Add Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 solution files
    </title>
    <details>
      We need Visual Studio 2005/2008 project files for Windows.
    </details>
  </issue>
</issues>

Disclaimer: There are probably some limitations.

Answer 6

I found this question while looking for "how to pretty print html"

Using some of the ideas in this thread I adapted the XML solutions to work for XML or HTML:

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString as string_to_dom

def prettify(string, html=True):
    dom = string_to_dom(string)
    ugly = dom.toprettyxml(indent="  ")
    split = list(filter(lambda x: len(x.strip()), ugly.split('\n')))
    if html:
        split = split[1:]
    pretty = '\n'.join(split)
    return pretty

def pretty_print(html):
    print(prettify(html))

When used this is what it looks like:

html = """\
<div class="foo" id="bar"><p>'IDK!'</p><br/><div class='baz'><div>
<span>Hi</span></div></div><p id='blarg'>Try for 2</p>
<div class='baz'>Oh No!</div></div>
"""

pretty_print(html)

Which returns:

<div class="foo" id="bar">
  <p>'IDK!'</p>
  <br/>
  <div class="baz">
    <div>
      <span>Hi</span>
    </div>
  </div>
  <p id="blarg">Try for 2</p>
  <div class="baz">Oh No!</div>
</div>