XMLGenerator python sax library: write out inline / closed tag

Question

I write out xml by using the python XMLGenerator class from xml.sax.saxutils.

    xmlwriter = XMLGenerator(output, encoding)
    xmlwriter.startDocument()
    xmlwriter.startElement("foo", {})
    ...
    xmlwriter.endElement("foo", {})

Writing out tags is always done by the startElement and endElement functions. For inline tags (something like XHTML's <br /> or <img />) I would want to write out the tag with end directly. Is there a way to do that with SAX?

Answer 1

If you're using Python 3.2 or later, there's a short_empty_elements parameter you can pass to XMLGenerator (see the Python xml.sax.utils docs).

For example:

from xml.sax.saxutils import *
import sys
output = sys.stdout
encoding = 'utf-8'
xmlwriter = XMLGenerator(output, encoding, short_empty_elements=True)
xmlwriter.startDocument()
xmlwriter.startElement(name="foo", attrs={})
xmlwriter.endElement(name="foo")

will produce the output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<foo/>