Question

Is there a easy way to accomplish the same thing in Python as xsl accomplishes with:

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

So for instance in the following

for event, elem in ElementTree.iterparse("/tmp/example.xml"):
    if elem.tag == "example":
        print ElementTree.tostring(elem)

when the example nodes are printed out all the spaces and line feeds in the input file between children of the example node will be removed?

Answer 1

If you can use the lxml module, this becomes much easier. From the lxml tutorial:

>>> parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True) # lxml.etree only!
>>> root = etree.XML("<root>  <a/>   <b>  </b>     </root>", parser)
>>> etree.tostring(root)
b'<root><a/><b>  </b></root>'