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I wanted to add Element with Subelements to my xml file using Python. But after changing file the Element and Subelement looks like a line, not like a xml-tree.

I do this:

tree = ET.parse('existing_file.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
new_object = ET.SubElement(root, 'object')
name = ET.SubElement(new_object, 'name')
name.text = 'car'
color = ET.SubElement(new_object, 'color')
color.text = 'Red'
new_tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
new_tree.write('new_file.xml')

But after this I've got file without structure like this:

<object><name>car</name><color>red</color></object>

But i need this:

<object>
     <name>car</name>
     <color>red</color>
</object>

what do I do wrong?

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2
  • 1
    Use indent(). See stackoverflow.com/a/39482716/407651 Commented Apr 17, 2024 at 14:33
  • 1
    Nothing wrong with that. Both are equally valid. It's just not indented. Commented Apr 17, 2024 at 14:34

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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using

new_tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
ET.indent(new_tree)
new_tree.write('new_file.xml', xml_declaration=True, short_empty_elements=True)

or using xml.dom.minidom.parseString

new_object = ET.SubElement(root, 'object')
name = ET.SubElement(new_object, 'name')
name.text = 'car'
color = ET.SubElement(new_object, 'color')
color.text = 'Red'

# Convert the ElementTree to a string with indentation
xml_string = ET.tostring(root, encoding='unicode')

# Use minidom to format the XML string
dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(xml_string)
formatted_xml = dom.toprettyxml()

# Write the formatted XML to a new file
with open('new_file.xml', 'w') as f:
    f.write(formatted_xml)

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<object>
    <name>car</name>
    <color>red</color>
    <object>
        <name>car</name>
        <color>Red</color>
    </object>
</object>
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1 Comment

I just saw that there are a lot of ways to format XML documents in this link

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