Question

I’m creating an web api and need a good way to very quickly generate some well formatted xml. I cannot find any good way of doing this in python.

Note: Some libraries look promising but either lack documentation or only output to files.

Answer 1

Using lxml:

from lxml import etree

# create XML 
root = etree.Element('root')
root.append(etree.Element('child'))
# another child with text
child = etree.Element('child')
child.text = 'some text'
root.append(child)

# pretty string
s = etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True)
print s

Output:

<root>
  <child/>
  <child>some text</child>
</root>

See the tutorial for more information.