Python etree control empty tag format

Question

When creating an XML file with Python\'s etree, if we write to the file an empty tag using SubElement, I get:

Answer 1

This was directly solved in Python 3.4. From then, the write method of xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree has the short_empty_elements parameter which:

controls the formatting of elements that contain no content. If True (the default), they are emitted as a single self-closed tag, otherwise they are emitted as a pair of start/end tags.

More details in the xml.etree documentation.