Pretty Printing XML in Python

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and is used to encode a document that can be understandable by both humans and machines. Data stored in XML format is easy to understand and easy to modify. There are three main things that have to keep in mind when you are using XML – Simplicity, Generality, and Usability. 

Pretty Printing XML using xml.dom.minidom

In this approach, we will directly create XML content in our editor i.e. We will not use any external XML files.

The XML we will be using is mentioned below: –

OriginalXml = '<?xml version= "2.0" ?>
<gfg>
   <instructor>
       <Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name>
   </instructor>
</gfg>'

DOM (document object model) is a cross-language API from W3C i.e. World Wide Web Consortium for accessing and modifying XML documents. Python enables you to parse XML files with the help of xml.dom.minidom, which is the minimal implementation of the DOM interface. It is simpler than the full DOM API and should be considered smaller.

Python3

import xml.dom.minidom

OriginalXml = '<?xml version= "1.0" ?><gfg>\
<instructor><Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name></instructor></gfg>'
temp = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(OriginalXml)
new_xml = temp.toprettyxml()
print(new_xml)

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<gfg>
    <instructor>
        <Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name>
    </instructor>
</gfg>

In this approach, we will create XML content in a file and access its content through the python open() function and the rest of the steps remain the same. For that, we need to create an XML file say gfg.xml in your code editor.

gfg.xml contains: 

<?xml version= “1.0” ?>
<gfg>
   <instructor>
<Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name>
   </instructor>
</gfg>

Python3

import xml.dom.minidom

with open('gfg.xml') as OriginalXML:
    temp = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(OriginalXML.read())
    New_XML = temp.toprettyxml()

print(New_XML)

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<gfg>
    <instructor>
        <Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name>
    </instructor>
</gfg>

Pretty Printing XML using BeautifulSoup

In this approach, we will be using Beautiful Soup for printing the XML content.

Python3

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

temp = BeautifulSoup(open("gfg.xml"), "xml")
new_xml = temp.prettify()
print(new_xml)

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<gfg>
 <instructor>
  <Name>
   Sandeep Jain Sir
  </Name>
 </instructor>
</gfg>

Pretty Printing XML using lxml

In this method, we will be using the python lxml module.

This library converts the original XML file to a more beautiful XML file.

Python3

from lxml import etree

temp = etree.parse("gfg.xml")
new_xml = etree.tostring(temp, pretty_print = True, encoding = str)
print(new_xml)

Output:

<gfg>
  <instructor>
    <Name>Sandeep Jain Sir</Name>
  </instructor>
</gfg>