Question

In django,

addQuickElement(name,content,attr)

generates XML like this

<name attr="attr">content</name>

While I want to generate

<name attr="attr" />

Answer 1

Just don’t specify the contents argument.

For reference, this is django/utils/xmlutils.py:

"""
Utilities for XML generation/parsing.
"""

from xml.sax.saxutils import XMLGenerator

class SimplerXMLGenerator(XMLGenerator):
    def addQuickElement(self, name, contents=None, attrs=None):
        "Convenience method for adding an element with no children"
        if attrs is None: attrs = {}
        self.startElement(name, attrs)
        if contents is not None:
            self.characters(contents)
        self.endElement(name)

You can see here that you just need to not specify contents, and so you can do x.addQuickElement(name, attrs=attrs).

(A quick look at XMLGenerator indicates this will still produce an end-tag, rather than a self-closing tag. In Python 3.2 an argument short_empty_elements was added to XMLGenerator.__init__, but Django isn’t still only compatible with Python 2.x. If you care about getting short tags, take a look at the xml.sax.saxutils.XMLGenerator.startElement implementation.)