Best way to generate xml in python?

Question

I'm creating an web api and need a good way to very quickly generate some well formatted xml. I cannot find any good way of doing this in python.

Note: Some libraries look promising but either lack documentation or only output to files.

Answer 1

Using lxml:

from lxml import etree

# create XML 
root = etree.Element('root')
root.append(etree.Element('child'))
# another child with text
child = etree.Element('child')
child.text = 'some text'
root.append(child)

# pretty string
s = etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True)
print s

Output:

<root>
  <child/>
  <child>some text</child>
</root>

See the tutorial for more information.

Answer 2

As an alternative, you can use StringIO with an XML library that reads from/outputs to a file.

http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html

Answer 3

ElementTree is a good module for reading xml and writing too e.g.

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement, tostring

root = Element('root')
child = SubElement(root, "child")
child.text = "I am a child"

print tostring(root)

Output:

<root><child>I am a child</child></root>

See this tutorial for more details and how to pretty print.

Alternatively if your XML is simple, do not underestimate the power of string formatting :)

xmlTemplate = """<root>
    <person>
        <name>%(name)s</name>
        <address>%(address)s</address>
     </person>
</root>"""

data = {'name':'anurag', 'address':'Pune, india'}
print xmlTemplate%data

Output:

<root>
    <person>
        <name>anurag</name>
        <address>Pune, india</address>
     </person>
</root>

You can use string.Template or some template engine too, for complex formatting.