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

I would use lxml (see http://lxml.de/api.html).

Then you can:

from lxml import etree
document = etree.Element('outer')
node = etree.SubElement(document, 'inner')
print(etree.tostring(document, xml_declaration=True))

Answer 2

I am surprised to find that there doesn't seem to be a way with ElementTree.tostring(). You can however use ElementTree.ElementTree.write() to write your XML document to a fake file:

from io import BytesIO
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

document = ET.Element('outer')
node = ET.SubElement(document, 'inner')
et = ET.ElementTree(document)

f = BytesIO()
et.write(f, encoding='utf-8', xml_declaration=True) 
print(f.getvalue())  # your XML file, encoded as UTF-8

See this question. Even then, I don't think you can get your 'standalone' attribute without writing prepending it yourself.

Answer 3

This works if you just want to print. Getting an error when I try to send it to a file...

import xml.dom.minidom as minidom
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement, Comment, tostring

def prettify(elem):
    rough_string = ET.tostring(elem, 'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

Answer 4

Easy

Sample for both Python 2 and 3 (encoding parameter must be utf8):

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.ElementTree(ElementTree.fromstring('<xml><test>123</test></xml>'))
root = tree.getroot()
print(ElementTree.tostring(root, encoding='utf8', method='xml'))

From Python 3.8 there is xml_declaration parameter for that stuff:

New in version 3.8: The xml_declaration and default_namespace parameters.

xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring(element, encoding="us-ascii", method="xml", *, xml_declaration=None, default_namespace=None, short_empty_elements=True) Generates a string representation of an XML element, including all subelements. element is an Element instance. encoding 1 is the output encoding (default is US-ASCII). Use encoding="unicode" to generate a Unicode string (otherwise, a bytestring is generated). method is either "xml", "html" or "text" (default is "xml"). xml_declaration, default_namespace and short_empty_elements has the same meaning as in ElementTree.write(). Returns an (optionally) encoded string containing the XML data.

Sample for Python 3.8 and higher:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.ElementTree(ElementTree.fromstring('<xml><test>123</test></xml>'))
root = tree.getroot()
print(ElementTree.tostring(root, encoding='unicode', method='xml', xml_declaration=True))

Answer 5

Another pretty simple option is to concatenate the desired header to the string of xml like this:

xml = (bytes('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n', encoding='utf-8') + ET.tostring(root))
xml = xml.decode('utf-8')
with open('invoice.xml', 'w+') as f:
    f.write(xml)