I'm using lxml to write out a cXML file, but I can't figure out how to get it to write out the opening <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> along with the doctype following it. When I started this, I started straight in on the document itself, with the first Element being cXML timestamp="2015-02-01'T'12:00:00Z">' and so on. Now I realize I'm probably getting parsing errors due to there not being the opening tags and a doctype definition, but I have no idea how to get lxml how to write those out.
You can pass them as arguments to the tostring() method. An example:
from lxml import etree
root = etree.Element('root')
etree.SubElement(root, 'child1')
etree.SubElement(root, 'child2')
print etree.tostring(root, encoding='UTF-8', xml_declaration=True, doctype='''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">''')
That yields:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<root><child1/><child2/></root>