Is it really this ugly? I expected something like this:
doc = xmldoc()
doc.start('foo', { 'id': 'blah' })
doc.start('sub')
doc.text('subtext')
doc.close('sub')
doc.close('foo')
print doc
and I thought I had it in SimpleXMLWriter. However, I have to jump hoops to get it to output to a string, and it doesn’t have any pretty-print. I tried using ElementTree, but that also doesn’t pretty print! libxml2 is horribly low-level. lxml seems to do pretty printing, but it’s still just as ugly as the best option I’ve found so far, xml.dom.minidom:
from xml.dom.minidom import Document
foo = doc.createElement('foo')
foo.setAttribute('id', 'blah')
doc.appendChild(foo)
sub = doc.createElement('sub')
sub.appendChild(doc.createTextNode('subtext'))
foo.appendChild(sub)
Yuck! If I’m building up a document, I almost always want to append directly at the last point: why do I have to keep track of all these elements by hand? I presume I’m missing some small standard helper module, but #python didn’t know about it. Anyone?