Emitting namespace specifications with ElementTree in Python

Question

I am trying to emit an XML file with element-tree that contains an XML declaration and namespaces. Here is my sample code:

from xml.etree import ElementTree          


        

Answer 1

Although the docs say otherwise, I only was able to get an declaration by specifying both the xml_declaration and the encoding.

You have to declare nodes in the namespace you've registered to get the namespace on the nodes in the file. Here's a fixed version of your code:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
ET.register_namespace('com',"http://www.company.com") #some name

# build a tree structure
root = ET.Element("{http://www.company.com}STUFF")
body = ET.SubElement(root, "{http://www.company.com}MORE_STUFF")
body.text = "STUFF EVERYWHERE!"

# wrap it in an ElementTree instance, and save as XML
tree = ET.ElementTree(root)

tree.write("page.xml",
           xml_declaration=True,encoding='utf-8',
           method="xml")

Output (page.xml)

STUFF EVERYWHERE!

ElementTree doesn't pretty-print either. Here's pretty-printed output:

    STUFF EVERYWHERE!

---

You can also declare a default namespace and don't need to register one:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

# build a tree structure
root = ET.Element("{http://www.company.com}STUFF")
body = ET.SubElement(root, "{http://www.company.com}MORE_STUFF")
body.text = "STUFF EVERYWHERE!"

# wrap it in an ElementTree instance, and save as XML
tree = ET.ElementTree(root)

tree.write("page.xml",
           xml_declaration=True,encoding='utf-8',
           method="xml",default_namespace='http://www.company.com')

Output (pretty-print spacing is mine)

    STUFF EVERYWHERE!