Pretty print in lxml is failing when I add tags to a parsed tree

Question

I have an xml file that I\'m using etree from lxml to work with, but when I add tags to it, pretty printing doesn\'t seem to work.

>>> from lxml imp         


        

Answer 1

It has to do with how lxml treats whitespace -- see the lxml FAQ for details.

To fix this, change the loading part of the file to the following:

parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
root = etree.parse('file.xml', parser).getroot()

I didn't test it, but it should indent your file just fine with this change.

Answer 2

I was having the same issue when writing to files, for anyone else with this issue:

I created a helper function that pretty_prints after I run my main function.

from lxml import etree

def ppxml(xml):
    parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
    tree = etree.parse(xml, parser)
    tree.write(xml, encoding='utf-8', pretty_print=True, xml_declaration=True)

In in my main program file

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()
    ppxml(xml)