Convert Python ElementTree to string

Question

Whenever I call ElementTree.tostring(e), I get the following error message:

AttributeError: \'Element\' object has no attribute \'getroot\'
         


        

Answer 1

Non-Latin Answer Extension

Extension to @Stevoisiak's answer and dealing with non-Latin characters. Only one way will display the non-Latin characters to you. The one method is different on both Python 3 and Python 2.

Input

xml = ElementTree.fromstring('')
xml = ElementTree.Element("Person", Name="크리스")  # Read Note about Python 2

NOTE: In Python 2, when calling the toString(...) code, assigning xml with ElementTree.Element("Person", Name="크리스")will raise an error...

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xed in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Output

ElementTree.tostring(xml)
# Python 3 (크리스): b''
# Python 3 (John): b''

# Python 2 (크리스): 
# Python 2 (John): 


ElementTree.tostring(xml, encoding='unicode')
# Python 3 (크리스):              <-------- Python 3
# Python 3 (John): 

# Python 2 (크리스): LookupError: unknown encoding: unicode
# Python 2 (John): LookupError: unknown encoding: unicode

ElementTree.tostring(xml, encoding='utf-8')
# Python 3 (크리스): b''
# Python 3 (John): b''

# Python 2 (크리스):              <-------- Python 2
# Python 2 (John): 

ElementTree.tostring(xml).decode()
# Python 3 (크리스): 
# Python 3 (John): 

# Python 2 (크리스): 
# Python 2 (John):