Creating a simple XML file using python

Question

What are my options if I want to create a simple XML file in python? (library wise)

The xml I want looks like:

Answer 1

For such a simple XML structure, you may not want to involve a full blown XML module. Consider a string template for the simplest structures, or Jinja for something a little more complex. Jinja can handle looping over a list of data to produce the inner xml of your document list. That is a bit trickier with raw python string templates

For a Jinja example, see my answer to a similar question.

Here is an example of generating your xml with string templates.

import string
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape

inner_template = string.Template('    ${value}')

outer_template = string.Template("""
 
${document_list}
 

 """)

data = [
    (1, 'foo', 'The value for the foo document'),
    (2, 'bar', 'The  for the  document'),
]

inner_contents = [inner_template.substitute(id=id, name=name, value=escape(value)) for (id, name, value) in data]
result = outer_template.substitute(document_list='\n'.join(inner_contents))
print result

Output:

 
    The value for the foo document
    The <value> for the <bar> document
 

The downer of the template approach is that you won't get escaping of < and > for free. I danced around that problem by pulling in a util from xml.sax