xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'write'

user_4742411 0
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I want to read a XML string, edit it and save it as a XML file.

However I get the mentioned error in the title when I do .write()

I found out that when you read an XML string using ElementTree.fromstring(string) it will create an ElementTree.Element and not an ElementTree itself. An Element has no write method but the ElementTree does.

How can I write an Element to a XML file? Or how can I create an ElementTree and add my Element to that and then use the .write method?

elementtree xml python
2 Answers

I found out that when you read a xml string using ElementTree.fromstring(string) it will actually create an ElementTree.Element and not a ElementTree itself.

Yes, you get the top-level element back (also called the "document element").

An Element has no write method but the ElementTree does.

The ElementTree constructor signature goes like this:

class xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree(element=None, file=None)

Therefore it's completely straightforward:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

doc = ET.fromstring("<test>test öäü</test>")

tree = ET.ElementTree(doc)
tree.write("test.xml", encoding="utf-8")

You always should specify the encoding when writing an XML file. Most of the time, UTF-8 is the best choice.

Tomalak_187710

In case this helps anyone who gets this unclear error message when trying to use ElementTree to write an xml file, and spends way too long on it (like I did):

File "/usr/lib/python3.5/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 788, in _get_writer
write = file_or_filename.write
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'write'

... in my case, it was simply because the path to the directory I was trying to write my xml file to did not exist! For example:

tree.write("/FolderDidNotExist/test.xml", encoding="utf-8")

a simple mkdir /FolderDidNotExist did the trick. No more error. (Of course, this error message could use some "love" so I'm posting this here in case I forget what it means again [which I've done] and need to google this again)

user_7968580
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