Pretty Print XML in Python
February 3, 2011
The xmlpp library can be used to convert xml into a pretty format. Unfortunately, it still puts text nodes on their own lines:
<tag> <tag> Text </tag> </tag>
when what we really want is:
<tag> <tag>Text</tag> </tag>
Older versions of xmlpp also didn't support namespace prefixes - the version of March 2010 does.
It's pure python, so download it from http://xmlpp.codeplex.com/ and then include it in your source.
Import it, then run:
import xmlpp as xmlpp from StringIO import StringIO import re xmlpp.pprint(lXml, output=lStringIO, indent=2, width=160) lUglyXml = lStringIO.getvalue() text_re = re.compile('>\n\s+([^<>\s].*?)\n\s+</', re.DOTALL) lPrettyXml = text_re.sub('>\g<1></', lUglyXml) return lPrettyXml
This will output the XML formatted nicely, as we expect.
