While I'm trying to run through an lxml tutorial, I couldn't help but wonder why when I use the print command, the output to the screen keeps wanting to put everything on one line even with pretty_print=True.
So say I just installed Python 3.4.3 64-bit and installed lxml-3.4.0.win32-py3.4.exe after Python was installed.
Then, in IDLE or at the python.exe cmd prompt, I do the following:
from lxml import etree
root = etree.XML('<root><a><b/></a></root>')
print(etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True))
What I (and the tutorial) expected was the following output to the screen:
<root>
<a>
<b/>
</a>
</root>
But what I actually see in both IDLE and the python cmd prompt in the Windows 7 is this:
b'<root>\n <a>\n <b/>\n </a>\n</root>\n'
So why does the interpreter do this? Is there a way to toggle between single-line mode and the more normal standard output? And perhaps more importantly, if I want to write this XML to a file, will Python with the lxml insist on putting the \n and everything else on a line instead of pretty-printing this the way it's supposed to?
Thanks, Johnny
What you see is the representation of the bytes string. You can write bytes directly to a file:
with open("file.xml", "wb") as output:
output.write(etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True))
print expects an unicode string, so you have to encode to unicode:
print(etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True, encoding='unicode'))