Remove whitespaces in XML string

Question

How can I remove the whitespaces and line breaks in an XML string in Python 2.6? I tried the following packages:

etree: This snippet keeps the original whitespaces:<

Answer 1

The only thing that bothers me about xml.dom.minidom's toprettyxml() is that it adds blank lines. I don't seem to get the split components, so I just wrote a simple function to remove the blank lines:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import xml.dom.minidom

# toprettyxml() without the blank lines
def prettyPrint(x):
    for line in x.toprettyxml().split('\n'):
        if not line.strip() == '':
            print line

xml_string = "\nsomething\nparrot\n"

# parse XML
x = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(xml_string)

# clean
prettyPrint(x)

And this is what the code outputs:

        something
        parrot

If I use toprettyxml() by itself, i.e. print(toprettyxml(x)), it adds unnecessary blank lines:

        something


        parrot