Python pretty print an XML given an XML string

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I generated a long and ugly XML string with Python and I need to filter it through pretty printer to look nicer.

I found this post for python pretty printers, but I have to write the XML string to a file to be read back to use the tools, which I want to avoid if possible.

What python pretty tools are available that work on strings?

pretty-print xml python
3 Answers

Here's a Python3 solution that gets rid of the ugly newline issue (tons of whitespace), and it only uses standard libraries unlike most other implementations. You mention that you have an xml string already so I am going to assume you used xml.dom.minidom.parseString()

With the following solution you can avoid writing to a file first:

import xml.dom.minidom
import os

def pretty_print_xml_given_string(input_string, output_xml):
    """
    Useful for when you are editing xml data on the fly
    """
    xml_string = input_string.toprettyxml()
    xml_string = os.linesep.join([s for s in xml_string.splitlines() if s.strip()]) # remove the weird newline issue
    with open(output_xml, "w") as file_out:
        file_out.write(xml_string)

I found how to fix the common newline issue here.

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