Creating a simple XML file using python

Question

These days, the most popular (and very simple) option is the ElementTree API, which has been included in the standard library since Python 2.5.

The available options for that are:

• ElementTree (Basic, pure-Python implementation of ElementTree. Part of the standard library since 2.5)
• cElementTree (Optimized C implementation of ElementTree. Also offered in the standard library since 2.5. Deprecated and folded into the regular ElementTree as an automatic thing as of 3.3.)
• LXML (Based on libxml2. Offers a rich superset of the ElementTree API as well XPath, CSS Selectors, and more)

Here's an example of how to generate your example document using the in-stdlib cElementTree:

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

root = ET.Element("root")
doc = ET.SubElement(root, "doc")

ET.SubElement(doc, "field1", name="blah").text = "some value1"
ET.SubElement(doc, "field2", name="asdfasd").text = "some vlaue2"

tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
tree.write("filename.xml")

I've tested it and it works, but I'm assuming whitespace isn't significant. If you need "prettyprint" indentation, let me know and I'll look up how to do that. (It may be an LXML-specific option. I don't use the stdlib implementation much)

For further reading, here are some useful links:

• API docs for the implementation in the Python standard library
• Introductory Tutorial (From the original author's site)
• LXML etree tutorial. (With example code for loading the best available option from all major ElementTree implementations)

As a final note, either cElementTree or LXML should be fast enough for all your needs (both are optimized C code), but in the event you're in a situation where you need to squeeze out every last bit of performance, the benchmarks on the LXML site indicate that:

• LXML clearly wins for serializing (generating) XML
• As a side-effect of implementing proper parent traversal, LXML is a bit slower than cElementTree for parsing.

The lxml library includes a very convenient syntax for XML generation, called the E-factory. Here's how I'd make the example you give:

#!/usr/bin/python
import lxml.etree
import lxml.builder    

E = lxml.builder.ElementMaker()
ROOT = E.root
DOC = E.doc
FIELD1 = E.field1
FIELD2 = E.field2

the_doc = ROOT(
        DOC(
            FIELD1('some value1', name='blah'),
            FIELD2('some value2', name='asdfasd'),
            )   
        )   

print lxml.etree.tostring(the_doc, pretty_print=True)

Output:

<root>
  <doc>
    <field1 name="blah">some value1</field1>
    <field2 name="asdfasd">some value2</field2>
  </doc>
</root>

It also supports adding to an already-made node, e.g. after the above you could say

the_doc.append(FIELD2('another value again', name='hithere'))

Yattag http://www.yattag.org/ or https://github.com/leforestier/yattag provides an interesting API to create such XML document (and also HTML documents).

It's using context manager and with keyword.

from yattag import Doc, indent

doc, tag, text = Doc().tagtext()

with tag('root'):
    with tag('doc'):
        with tag('field1', name='blah'):
            text('some value1')
        with tag('field2', name='asdfasd'):
            text('some value2')

result = indent(
    doc.getvalue(),
    indentation = ' '*4,
    newline = '\r\n'
)

print(result)

so you will get:

<root>
    <doc>
        <field1 name="blah">some value1</field1>
        <field2 name="asdfasd">some value2</field2>
    </doc>
</root>

For the simplest choice, I'd go with minidom: http://docs.python.org/library/xml.dom.minidom.html . It is built in to the python standard library and is straightforward to use in simple cases.

Here's a pretty easy to follow tutorial: http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/XML_intro.html

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('    <field${id} name="${name}">${value}</field${id}>')

outer_template = string.Template("""<root>
 <doc>
${document_list}
 </doc>
</root>
 """)

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

<root>
 <doc>
    <field1 name="foo">The value for the foo document</field1>
    <field2 name="bar">The &lt;value&gt; for the &lt;bar&gt; document</field2>
 </doc>
</root>

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