How to get string dump of lxml Element

Question

I have an lxml Element object:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> xml_str = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<state type=\"before_battle\">\n</state>"
>>> etree.fromstring(xml_str.encode('utf-8'))
<Element state at 0x7fd04b957e48>

How to get the string dump of Element?

nosklo · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-14 20:23:37Z

21

first store the element object in a variable

>>> d = etree.fromstring(xml_str.encode('utf-8'))

Then use the tostring function from the lxml.etree module:

>>> etree.tostring(d)
'<state type="before_battle">\n</state>'

For additional use cases, you can check out the lxml.etree Tutorial.

edited Jun 14, 2018 at 20:23

answered Jun 14, 2018 at 20:11

nosklo

224k58 gold badges300 silver badges299 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Michel de Ruiter · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-02 15:37:38Z

1

One nuance I noticed, to be able to actually print the dump (with modern Python), one has to specify encoding=str:

print(etree.tostring(node, encoding=str))

Also, with_tail=False might be of use.

answered Sep 2 at 15:37

Michel de Ruiter

8,1457 gold badges55 silver badges81 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to get string dump of lxml Element

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related