Writing XML in Python using SAX

Question

Looking at the Python SAX documentation I only see reading XML using SAX. But I would like to write it.
I figured out how to do that in Java a while ago:

 public void renderXML(OutputStream out) {
      PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(out);
      StreamResult streamResult = new StreamResult(pw);
      SAXTransformerFactory tf = (SAXTransformerFactory) TransformerFactory.newInstance();
      TransformerHandler hd = tf.newTransformerHandler();
      Transformer serializer = hd.getTransformer();
      serializer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
      serializer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD,"xml");
      serializer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes"); // So it looks pretty in VI
      hd.setResult(streamResult);
      hd.startDocument();
      AttributesImpl atts = new AttributesImpl();
      atts.addAttribute("", "", "someattribute", "CDATA", "test");
      atts.addAttribute("", "", "moreattributes", "CDATA", "test2");
      hd.startElement("", "", "MyTag", atts);
      String curTitle = "Something inside a tag";
      hd.characters(curTitle.toCharArray(), 0, curTitle.length());
      hd.endElement("", "", "MyTag");
      hd.endDocument();
   }

What would be the Python equivalent? I checked an answer on SO using ElementTree - but that is rather the DOM way to do things (and problematic for really large output). Another question is un-answered. Or: what is the better approach writing out XML in Python?

For very large XML, an _not_so_elegant_but_working solution is using a template engine (like Cheetah for example: cheetahtemplate.org) — Luca Sepe
– Luca Sepe, Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 8:24

mcepl · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-04 20:31:59Z

1

https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.sax.handler.html and for an example of Bible in OSIS XML take a look at this script.

answered Mar 4, 2018 at 20:31

mcepl

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TextGeek · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-02 18:06:22Z

0

I don't know of a direct SAX-like way in Python; but I wrote a library for this that might perhaps be useful to you. It provides methods to open and close elements, make pis, comments, doctypes, etc. It has a fair range of higher-level features, like keeping track of what elements and inherited xml:lang values (if any) are in play, doing all the escaping for you (even %xx escaping for URIs in attributes), and things like "closeToElement(type)" etc. I find it makes it much easier to produce WF XML from Python. At http://www.derose.net/steve/utilities/PY/XmlOutput.py if interested.

answered Jun 2, 2015 at 18:06

TextGeek

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