do not collapse empty nodes in XML output

Question

I'm using python's xml.etree.ElementTree to represent an XML document. I want to output it to text but I want to keep empty elements (elements with no children) expanded, instead of collapsed. E.g., I want this:

<element></element>

Instead of this:

<element />

I'm currently using ElementTree.tostring, but I'm willing to use any other built-in python modules or functions to serialize the document, as long as I can pretty easily use an ElementTree object with it.

FYI, the reason I want to keep the elements expanded is because I want to more easily diff the output with output from a third party program which doesn't collapse empty elements.

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-05 14:37:04Z

6

You can pass method="html" to the tostring() call.

Demo:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
>>> data = """
... <root>
...     <person/>
...     <person></person>
... </root>
... """
>>> tree = etree.fromstring(data)
>>> print etree.tostring(tree, method="html")
<root>
    <person></person>
    <person></person>
</root>

answered May 5, 2014 at 14:37

alecxe

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2 Comments

brianmearns Over a year ago

Unfortunately, html output method does not properly preserve the case of tags. For instance, if you have a mixed case tag like "peasantFarmer", the opening tag is correct, but the closing tag is "peasantfarmer" (notice lower-case 'f'). Not sure if this is a bug or if its deliberate because HTML is supposed to be case insensitive (though I would have thought tag pairs still need to match).

John Over a year ago

This removes the XML declaration, even if you use xml_declaration=True.

Andrej · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-24 18:04:50Z

5

Just use: ElementTree.tostring(element, short_empty_elements=False)

answered Oct 24, 2015 at 18:04

Andrej

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1 Comment

Octo Over a year ago

That also works when saving the whole document to a file tree.write(file_name, encoding="UTF-8", short_empty_elements=False)

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