How to write XML declaration using xml.etree.ElementTree

Question

I am generating an XML document in Python using an ElementTree, but the tostring function doesn't include an XML declaration when converting to plaintext.

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, tostring

document = Element('outer')
node = SubElement(document, 'inner')
node.NewValue = 1
print tostring(document)  # Outputs "<outer><inner /></outer>"

I need my string to include the following XML declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>

However, there does not seem to be any documented way of doing this.

Is there a proper method for rendering the XML declaration in an ElementTree?

Answer 1

I am surprised to find that there doesn't seem to be a way with ElementTree.tostring(). You can however use ElementTree.ElementTree.write() to write your XML document to a fake file:

from io import BytesIO
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

document = ET.Element('outer')
node = ET.SubElement(document, 'inner')
et = ET.ElementTree(document)

f = BytesIO()
et.write(f, encoding='utf-8', xml_declaration=True) 
print(f.getvalue())  # your XML file, encoded as UTF-8

See this question. Even then, I don't think you can get your 'standalone' attribute without writing prepending it yourself.

Answer 2

I would use lxml (see http://lxml.de/api.html).

Then you can:

from lxml import etree
document = etree.Element('outer')
node = etree.SubElement(document, 'inner')
print(etree.tostring(document, xml_declaration=True))

Answer 3

If you include the encoding='utf8', you will get an XML header:

xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring writes a XML encoding declaration with encoding='utf8'

Sample Python code (works with Python 2 and 3):

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.ElementTree(
    ElementTree.fromstring('<xml><test>123</test></xml>')
)
root = tree.getroot()

print('without:')
print(ElementTree.tostring(root, method='xml'))
print('')
print('with:')
print(ElementTree.tostring(root, encoding='utf8', method='xml'))

Python 2 output:

$ python2 example.py
without:
<xml><test>123</test></xml>

with:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf8'?>
<xml><test>123</test></xml>

With Python 3 you will note the b prefix indicating byte literals are returned (just like with Python 2):

$ python3 example.py
without:
b'<xml><test>123</test></xml>'

with:
b"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf8'?>\n<xml><test>123</test></xml>"

Answer 4

I encounter this issue recently, after some digging of the code, I found the following code snippet is definition of function ElementTree.write

def write(self, file, encoding="us-ascii"):
    assert self._root is not None
    if not hasattr(file, "write"):
        file = open(file, "wb")
    if not encoding:
        encoding = "us-ascii"
    elif encoding != "utf-8" and encoding != "us-ascii":
        file.write("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='%s'?>\n" % 
     encoding)
    self._write(file, self._root, encoding, {})

So the answer is, if you need write the XML header to your file, set the encoding argument other than utf-8 or us-ascii, e.g. UTF-8

Answer 5

The minimal working example with ElementTree package usage:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

document = ET.Element('outer')
node = ET.SubElement(document, 'inner')
node.text = '1'
res = ET.tostring(document, encoding='utf8', method='xml').decode()
print(res)

the output is:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf8'?>
<outer><inner>1</inner></outer>

Answer 6

I would use ET:

try:
    from lxml import etree
    print("running with lxml.etree")
except ImportError:
    try:
        # Python 2.5
        import xml.etree.cElementTree as etree
        print("running with cElementTree on Python 2.5+")
    except ImportError:
        try:
            # Python 2.5
            import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
            print("running with ElementTree on Python 2.5+")
        except ImportError:
            try:
                # normal cElementTree install
                import cElementTree as etree
                print("running with cElementTree")
            except ImportError:
               try:
                   # normal ElementTree install
                   import elementtree.ElementTree as etree
                   print("running with ElementTree")
               except ImportError:
                   print("Failed to import ElementTree from any known place")

document = etree.Element('outer')
node = etree.SubElement(document, 'inner')
print(etree.tostring(document, encoding='UTF-8', xml_declaration=True))

Answer 7

This works if you just want to print. Getting an error when I try to send it to a file...

import xml.dom.minidom as minidom
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement, Comment, tostring

def prettify(elem):
    rough_string = ET.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

Answer 8

Including 'standalone' in the declaration

I didn't found any alternative for adding the standalone argument in the documentation so I adapted the ET.tosting function to take it as an argument.

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

# Sample
document = ET.Element('outer')
node = ET.SubElement(document, 'inner')
et = ET.ElementTree(document)

 # Function that you need   
 def tostring(element, declaration, encoding=None, method=None,):
     class dummy:
         pass
     data = []
     data.append(declaration+"\n")
     file = dummy()
     file.write = data.append
     ET.ElementTree(element).write(file, encoding, method=method)
     return "".join(data)
# Working example
xdec = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>"""    
xml = tostring(document, encoding='utf-8', declaration=xdec)

Answer 9

Another pretty simple option is to concatenate the desired header to the string of xml like this:

xml = (bytes('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n', encoding='utf-8') + ET.tostring(root))
xml = xml.decode('utf-8')
with open('invoice.xml', 'w+') as f:
    f.write(xml)