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.

Answer 1

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('123')
)
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:
123

with:

123

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

$ python3 example.py
without:
b'123'

with:
b"\n123"