I couldn't find any native lxml solutions to make my XML look pretty. All I found were some functions on various code sites written by people to pretty print the XML using a bunch of regular expressions. Yuck.
And it seems to work just fine as a function to return pretty XML, not to mention it's super short and sweet.
Anyway, here's an example of using the XSL for pretty printing.
from lxml import etree def prettify(someXML): #for more on lxml/XSLT see: http://lxml.de/xpathxslt.html#xslt-result-objects xslt_tree = etree.XML('''\ <!-- XSLT taken from Comment 4 by Michael Kay found here: http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/pretty.html#d8621e19 --> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" encoding="UTF-8"/> <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:copy-of select="."/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>''') transform = etree.XSLT(xslt_tree) result = transform(someXML) return unicode(result) myXML = etree.XML('<a><b><c><d/></c></b></a>') print prettify(myXML)
The example above would output the following:
By the way I don't even need to see the XML I'm processing most of the time, so why all the pretty printing fuss?
Well, because it bothers me …
And all good XML should look like an X-wing starfighter. If it doesn't your probably doing something wrong or your schema just sucks.
It isn't called an X-wing for no reason.