How to get string dump of lxml Element

Question

I have an lxml Element object:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> xml_str = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<state type=\"before_battle\">\n</state>"
>>> etree.fromstring(xml_str.encode('utf-8'))
<Element state at 0x7fd04b957e48>

How to get the string dump of Element?

Answer 1

first store the element object in a variable

>>> d = etree.fromstring(xml_str.encode('utf-8'))

Then use the tostring function from the lxml.etree module:

>>> etree.tostring(d)
'<state type="before_battle">\n</state>'

For additional use cases, you can check out the lxml.etree Tutorial.