Question

when using Python’s stock XML tools such as xml.dom.minidom for XML writing, a file would always start off like

<?xml version="1.0"?>

[...]

While this is perfectly legal XML code, and it’s even recommended to use the header, I’d like to get rid of it as one of the programs I’m working with has problems here.

I can’t seem to find the appropriate option in xml.dom.minidom, so I wondered if there are other packages which do allow to neglect the header.

Cheers,

Nico

Answer 1

Unfortunately minidom does not give you the option to omit the XML Declaration.

But you can always serialise the document content yourself by calling toxml() on the document’s root element instead of the document. Then you won’t get an XML Declaration:

xml= document.documentElement.toxml('utf-8')

…but then you also wouldn’t get anything else outside the root element, such as the DOCTYPE, or any comments or processing instructions. If you need them, serialise each child of the document object one by one:

xml= '\n'.join(node.toxml('utf-8') for node in document.childNodes)

I wondered if there are other packages which do allow to neglect the header.

DOM Level 3 LS defines an xml-declaration config parameter you can use to suppress it. The only Python implementation I know of is pxdom, which is thorough on standards support, but not at all fast.