XML writing tools for Python

Question

I\'m currently trying ElementTree and it looks fine, it escapes HTML entities and so on and so forth. Am I missing something truly wonderful I haven\'t heard of?

Thi

Answer 1

There's always SimpleXMLWriter, part of the ElementTree toolkit. The interface is dead simple.

Here's an example:

from elementtree.SimpleXMLWriter import XMLWriter
import sys

w = XMLWriter(sys.stdout)
html = w.start("html")

w.start("head")
w.element("title", "my document")
w.element("meta", name="generator", value="my application 1.0")
w.end()

w.start("body")
w.element("h1", "this is a heading")
w.element("p", "this is a paragraph")

w.start("p")
w.data("this is ")
w.element("b", "bold")
w.data(" and ")
w.element("i", "italic")
w.data(".")
w.end("p")

w.close(html)

Answer 2

don't you actually want something like:

html(head(script(type='text/javascript', content='var a = ...')),
body(h1('And I like the fact that 3 < 1'), p('just some paragraph'))

I think I saw something like that somewhere. This would be wonderful.

EDIT: Actually, I went and wrote a library today to do just that: magictree

You can use it like this:

from magictree import html, head, script, body, h1, p
root = html(
         head(
           script('''var a = 'I love á letters''', 
                  type='text/javascript')),
         body(
           h1('And I like the fact that 3 > 1')))

# root is a plain Element object, like those created with ET.Element...
# so you can write it out using ElementTree :)
tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
tree.write('foo.xhtml')

The magic in magictree lies in how the importing works: The Element factories are created when needed. Have a look at the source, it is based on an answer to another StackOverflow question.