How to save an XML file to disk with python?

Question

I have some python code to generate some XML text with xml.dom.minidom . Right now, I run it from the terminal and it outputs me a structured XML as a result. I would like it also to generate an XML file and save it to my disk. How could that be done?

This is what I have:

import xml
from xml.dom.minidom import Document
import copy


class dict2xml(object):
    doc     = Document()

    def __init__(self, structure):
        if len(structure) == 1:
            rootName    = str(structure.keys()[0])
            self.root   = self.doc.createElement(rootName)

            self.doc.appendChild(self.root)
            self.build(self.root, structure[rootName])

    def build(self, father, structure):
        if type(structure) == dict:
            for k in structure:
                tag = self.doc.createElement(k)
                father.appendChild(tag)
                self.build(tag, structure[k])

        elif type(structure) == list:
            grandFather = father.parentNode
            tagName     = father.tagName
            # grandFather.removeChild(father)
            for l in structure:
                tag = self.doc.createElement(tagName.rstrip('s'))
                self.build(tag, l)
                father.appendChild(tag)

        else:
            data    = str(structure)
            tag     = self.doc.createTextNode(data)
            father.appendChild(tag)

    def display(self):
        print self.doc.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

This just generates the XML. How could I also have it saved as a file to my desktop?

Answer 1

Read about python files, if you xml as string you can just write it to a file e.g.

xml = "<myxmldata/>"
f =  open("myxmlfile.xml", "wb")
f.write(xml)
f.close()

To obtain xml string from minidom nodes you can either use

xml = Node.toxml()

or you can directly write to a object which supports write e.g. a file

Node.writexml(f)