第七章：数据持久存储与交换-xml.etree.ElementTree:XML操纵API-美观打印XML

7.5.9 美观打印XML
ElementTree不会通过格式化tostring()的输出来提高可读性，因为增加额外的空白符会改变文档的内容。为了让输出更易读，后面的例子将使用xml.dom.minidom解析XML,然后使用它的toprettyxml()方法。

# ElementTree_pretty.py

from xml.etree import ElementTree
from xml.dom import minidom

def prettify(elem):
    """Return a pretty-printed XML string for the Element.
    """
    rough_string = ElementTree.tostring(elem,'utf-8')
    reparsed = minidom.parseString(rough_string)
    return reparsed.toprettyxml(indent="  ")

更新后，这个例子如以下代码清单所示：

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element,SubElement,Comment
from ElementTree_pretty import prettify

top = Element('top')

comment = Comment('Generared for PyMOTW')
top.append(comment)

child = SubElement(top,'child')
child.text = 'This child contains text.'

child_with_tail = SubElement(top,'child_with_tail')
child_with_tail.text = 'This child has text.'
child_with_tail.tail = 'And "tail" text.'

child_with_entity_ref = SubElement(top,'child_with_entity_ref')
child_with_entity_ref.text = 'This & That'

print(prettify(top))

输出也会更易读。
运行结果：

除了增加用于格式化的额外空白符，xml.dom.minidom美观打印器还会向输出增加一个XML声明。