Peter Hoffmann Follow Director Data Engineering at Blue Yonder. Python Developer, Conference Speaker, Mountaineer September 11, 2008

Best XML writing tool for Python

This my Answer to the stackoverflow question: Best XML writing tool for Python:

Another way is using the E Factory builder from lxml (available in Elementtree too)

>>> from lxml.builder import E

>>> def CLASS(*args): # class is a reserved word in Python
...     return {"class":' '.join(args)}

>>> html = page = (
...   E.html(       # create an Element called "html"
...     E.head(
...       E.title("This is a sample document")
...     ),
...     E.body(
...       E.h1("Hello!", CLASS("title")),
...       E.p("This is a paragraph with ", E.b("bold"), " text in it!"),
...       E.p("This is another paragraph, with a", "\n      ",
...         E.a("link", href="http://www.python.org"), "."),
...       E.p("Here are some reservered characters: <spam&egg>."),
...       etree.XML("<p>And finally an embedded XHTML fragment.</p>"),
...     )
...   )
... )

>>> print(etree.tostring(page, pretty_print=True))
<html>
  <head>
    <title>This is a sample document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1 class="title">Hello!</h1>
    <p>This is a paragraph with <b>bold</b> text in it!</p>
    <p>This is another paragraph, with a
      <a href="http://www.python.org">link</a>.</p>
    <p>Here are some reservered characters: &lt;spam&amp;egg&gt;.</p>
    <p>And finally an embedded XHTML fragment.</p>
  </body>
</html>