How to save an XML file to disk with python?

Question

I have some python code to generate some XML text with xml.dom.minidom . Right now, I run it from the terminal and it outputs me a structured XML as a result. I would like it also to generate an XML file and save it to my disk. How could that be done?

This is what I have:

import xml
from xml.dom.minidom import Document
import copy


class dict2xml(object):
    doc     = Document()

    def __init__(self, structure):
        if len(structure) == 1:
            rootName    = str(structure.keys()[0])
            self.root   = self.doc.createElement(rootName)

            self.doc.appendChild(self.root)
            self.build(self.root, structure[rootName])

    def build(self, father, structure):
        if type(structure) == dict:
            for k in structure:
                tag = self.doc.createElement(k)
                father.appendChild(tag)
                self.build(tag, structure[k])

        elif type(structure) == list:
            grandFather = father.parentNode
            tagName     = father.tagName
            # grandFather.removeChild(father)
            for l in structure:
                tag = self.doc.createElement(tagName.rstrip('s'))
                self.build(tag, l)
                father.appendChild(tag)

        else:
            data    = str(structure)
            tag     = self.doc.createTextNode(data)
            father.appendChild(tag)

    def display(self):
        print self.doc.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

This just generates the XML. How could I also have it saved as a file to my desktop?

Hafnernuss · Accepted Answer · 2023-09-07 05:15:00Z

18

You probably want to use Node.writexml() on the root node of your XML DOM tree. This will write your root element and all child elements to an XML file, doing all the becessary indenting etc. along the way.

See the documentation for xml.dom.minidom:

Node.writexml(writer[, indent=""[, addindent=""[, newl=""]]])

Write XML to the writer object. The writer should have a write() method which matches that of the file object interface. The indent parameter is the indentation of the current node. The addindent parameter is the incremental indentation to use for subnodes of the current one. The newl parameter specifies the string to use to terminate newlines.

For the Document node, an additional keyword argument encoding can be used to specify the encoding field of the XML header.

Changed in version 2.1: The optional keyword parameters indent, addindent, and newl were added to support pretty output.

Changed in version 2.3: For the Document node, an additional keyword argument encoding can be used to specify the encoding field of the XML header.

Usage will be somewhat like:

file_handle = open("filename.xml","wb")
Your_Root_Node.writexml(file_handle)
file_handle.close()

edited Sep 7, 2023 at 5:15

Hafnernuss

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answered Mar 28, 2012 at 17:32

Li-aung Yip

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2 Comments

Li-aung Yip Over a year ago

What exactly did you try? Your edited question only includes code for pretty-printing the XML to the console. It does not include your attempt to use writexml(), so we can't help you fix that. Please show us how you attempted to use writexml() and how it failed to work (was there an error message? or did it fail to work as you intended?)

Anthony Awuley Over a year ago

Opening in mode "wb" didnt work for me however just "w" worked

Anurag Uniyal · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-28 18:12:30Z

7

Read about python files, if you xml as string you can just write it to a file e.g.

xml = "<myxmldata/>"
f =  open("myxmlfile.xml", "wb")
f.write(xml)
f.close()

To obtain xml string from minidom nodes you can either use

xml = Node.toxml()

or you can directly write to a object which supports write e.g. a file

Node.writexml(f)

edited Mar 28, 2012 at 18:12

answered Mar 28, 2012 at 17:24

Anurag Uniyal

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3 Comments

paulsm4 Over a year ago

@Lucas Pereira - "files" are only 1/2 the story. You need 1) to create and populate a SimplXML object, then 2) write the object to a text file. Li-aung Yip discusses how.

Anurag Uniyal Over a year ago

@paulsm4 he said he is already generating the xml output to terminal

paulsm4 Over a year ago

@Anurag Uniyal - your original example (before you edited it), only had "f.write()". I wanted to emphasize to Lucas Pereira that he also needed something like "Your_Root_Node.writexml(file_handle)" (which Li-aung Yip said in his first post) or "Node.writexml(f)" (which you only added after your edit).

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