I am using SQLite to access a database and retrieve the desired information. I'm using ElementTree in Python version 2.6 to create an XML file with that information.
import sqlite3
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
# NOTE: Omitted code where I acccess the database,
# pull data, and add elements to the tree
tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
# Pretty printing to Python shell for testing purposes
from xml.dom import minidom
print minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml(indent = " ")
####### Here lies my problem #######
tree.write("New_Database.xml")
I've tried using tree.write("New_Database.xml", "utf-8")
in place of the last line of code above, but it did not edit the XML's layout at all - it's still a jumbled mess.
I also decided to fiddle around and tried doing:
tree = minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml(indent = " ")
instead of printing this to the Python shell, which gives the error AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'write'.
When I write my tree to an XML file on the last line, is there a way to pretty print to the XML file as it does to the Python shell?
Can I use toprettyxml()
here or is there a different way to do this?
Whatever your XML string is, you can write it to the file of your choice by opening a file for writing and writing the string to the file.
from xml.dom import minidom
xmlstr = minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml(indent=" ")
with open("New_Database.xml", "w") as f:
f.write(xmlstr)
There is one possible complication, especially in Python 2, which is both less strict and less sophisticated about Unicode characters in strings. If your toprettyxml
method hands back a Unicode string (u"something"
), then you may want to cast it to a suitable file encoding, such as UTF-8. E.g. replace the one write line with:
f.write(xmlstr.encode('utf-8'))