Convert Python ElementTree to string

Question

Whenever I call ElementTree tostring e   I get the following error message   AttributeError   Element  object has no attribute  getroot    Is there any other way to convert an ElementTree object into an XML string   TraceBack   Traceback  most recent call last     File  Development Python REObjectSort REObjectResolver py   line 145  in  lt module gt      cm   integrateDataWithCsv cm  csvm    File  Development Python REObjectSort REObjectResolver py   line 137  in integrateDataWithCsv     xmlstr   ElementTree tostring et getroot   encoding  utf8  method  xml   AttributeError   Element  object has no attribute  getroot

User · Accepted Answer

Element objects have no  getroot   method  Drop that call  and the  tostring   call works  xmlstr   ElementTree tostring et  encoding  utf8   method  xml    You only need to use  getroot   if you have an ElementTree instance  Other notes   This produces a bytestring  which in Python 3 is the bytes type  If you must have a str object  you have two options   Decode the resulting bytes value  from UTF-8  xmlstr decode  quot utf8 quot    Use encoding  unicode   this avoids an encode   decode cycle  xmlstr   ElementTree tostring et  encoding  unicode   method  xml       If you wanted the UTF-8 encoded bytestring value or are using Python 2  take into account that ElementTree doesn t properly detect utf8 as the standard XML encoding  so it ll add a  lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  utf8   gt  declaration  Use utf-8 or UTF-8  with a dash  if you want to prevent this  When using encoding  quot unicode quot  no declaration header is added

User · Answer

How do I convert ElementTree Element to a String  For Python 3  xml str   ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  unicode    For Python 2  xml str   ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  utf-8    The following is compatible with both Python 2  amp  3  but only works for Latin characters  xml str   ElementTree tostring xml  decode     Example usage from xml etree import ElementTree  xml   ElementTree Element  quot Person quot   Name  quot John quot   xml str   ElementTree tostring xml  decode   print xml str   Output   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt    Explanation Despite what the name implies  ElementTree tostring   returns a bytestring by default in Python 2  amp  3  This is an issue in Python 3  which uses Unicode for strings   In Python 2 you could use the str type for both text and binary data  Unfortunately this confluence of two different concepts could lead to brittle code which sometimes worked for either kind of data  sometimes not        To make the distinction between text and binary data clearer and more pronounced   Python 3  made text and binary data distinct types that cannot blindly be mixed together   Source  Porting Python 2 Code to Python 3 If we know what version of Python is being used  we can specify the encoding as unicode or utf-8  Otherwise  if we need compatibility with both Python 2  amp  3  we can use decode   to convert into the correct type  For reference  I ve included a comparison of  tostring   results between Python 2 and Python 3  ElementTree tostring xml    Python 3  b  lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt     Python 2   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt   ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  unicode     Python 3   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt    Python 2  LookupError  unknown encoding  unicode  ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  utf-8     Python 3  b  lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt     Python 2   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt   ElementTree tostring xml  decode     Python 3   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt    Python 2   lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt   Thanks to Martijn Peters for pointing out that the str datatype changed between Python 2 and 3   Why not use str    In most scenarios  using str   would be the  quot cannonical quot  way to convert an object to a string  Unfortunately  using this with Element returns the object s location in memory as a hexstring  rather than a string representation of the object s data  from xml etree import ElementTree  xml   ElementTree Element  quot Person quot   Name  quot John quot   print str xml       lt Element  Person  at 0x00497A80 gt

User · Answer

If you just need this for debugging to see how the XML looks like  then instead of print xml etree ElementTree tostring e   you can use dump like this  xml etree ElementTree dump e   And this works both with Element and ElementTree objects as e  so there should be no need for getroot  The documentation of dump says   xml etree ElementTree dump elem  Writes an element tree or element structure to sys stdout  This function should be used for debugging only  The exact output format is implementation dependent  In this version  it   s written as an ordinary XML file  elem is an element tree or an individual element  Changed in version 3 8  The dump   function now preserves the attribute order specified by the user

User · Answer

Non-Latin Answer Extension Extension to  Stevoisiak s answer and dealing with non-Latin characters  Only one way will display the non-Latin characters to you  The one method is different on both Python 3 and Python 2  Input xml   ElementTree fromstring   lt Person Name  quot     quot    gt    xml   ElementTree Element  quot Person quot   Name  quot     quot      Read Note about Python 2   NOTE  In Python 2  when calling the toString      code  assigning xml with ElementTree Element  quot Person quot   Name  quot     quot  will raise an error    UnicodeDecodeError   ascii  codec can t decode byte 0xed in position 0  ordinal not in range 128   Output ElementTree tostring xml    Python 3        b  lt Person Name  quot  amp  53356  amp  47532  amp  49828  quot    gt     Python 3  John   b  lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt      Python 2         lt Person Name  quot  amp  53356  amp  47532  amp  49828  quot    gt    Python 2  John    lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt    ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  unicode     Python 3         lt Person Name  quot     quot    gt               lt -------- Python 3   Python 3  John    lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt     Python 2        LookupError  unknown encoding  unicode   Python 2  John   LookupError  unknown encoding  unicode  ElementTree tostring xml  encoding  utf-8     Python 3        b  lt Person Name  quot  xed x81 xac xeb xa6 xac xec x8a xa4 quot    gt     Python 3  John   b  lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt      Python 2         lt Person Name  quot     quot    gt               lt -------- Python 2   Python 2  John    lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt   ElementTree tostring xml  decode     Python 3         lt Person Name  quot  amp  53356  amp  47532  amp  49828  quot    gt    Python 3  John    lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt     Python 2         lt Person Name  quot  amp  53356  amp  47532  amp  49828  quot    gt    Python 2  John    lt Person Name  quot John quot    gt

[python] Convert Python ElementTree to string

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