convert list to xml string in python

Question

I have following list in Python:

list = ["one", "two", "three", "four", "five"]

and would like to convert it to following string:

<field>one</field><field>two</field><field>three</field><field>four/field><field>five</field>

what is the most efficient way?

Greg Hewgill · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-24 01:58:44Z

1

One way to do this would be:

"".join("<field>{}</field>".format(x) for x in list)

This uses a "list comprehension" to iterate through your list and apply a string format to each element. Then, the elements created that way are joined together into one big string to get the final result.

answered Feb 24, 2017 at 1:58

Greg Hewgill

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7 Comments

bogumbiker Over a year ago

thanks but instead '>' and '<' I am getting < and >

Greg Hewgill Over a year ago

@bogumbiker: Well then there's more to what you're doing that you haven't shown. If you try the above interactively in a Python prompt, then it will produce the result you wanted. You are probably doing something like running this in a framework that automatically escapes HTML for you. If you want to generate raw HTML, you'll have to find a way to bypass that.

bogumbiker Over a year ago

thanks for the hint. I am doing this inside lxml.builder perhaps that is why?

Greg Hewgill Over a year ago

@bogumbiker: Yes, that's probably why. If you don't know how to solve that, then see Python: Injecting HTML content into a tag using lxml.html

bogumbiker Over a year ago

it is a xml document and I am trying to do following: fields = "".join("<field>{}</field>".format(x) for x in list) doc = etree.fromstring(fields) but getting error lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Extra content at the end of the document, line 1, column 20

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