Python in a Nutshell

Changing and Generating XML

Just like for HTML and other kinds of structured text, the simplest way to output an XML document is often to prepare and write it using Python’s normal string and file operations, covered in Chapter 9 and Chapter 10. Templating, covered in Chapter 22, is also often the best approach. Subclassing class XMLGenerator, covered earlier in this chapter, is a good way to generate an XML document that is like an input XML document, except for a few changes.

The xml.dom.minidom module offers yet another possibility, because its classes support methods to generate, insert, remove, and alter nodes in a DOM tree representing the document. You can create a DOM tree by parsing and then alter it, or you can create an empty DOM tree and populate it, and then output the resulting XML document with methods toxml, toprettyxml, or writexml of the Document instance. You can also output a subtree of the DOM tree by calling these methods on the Node that is the subtree’s root.

Factory Methods of a Document Object

The Document class supplies factory methods to create new instances of subclasses of Node. The most frequently used factory methods of a Document instance d are as follows.

Mutating Methods of an Element Object

An instance e of class Element supplies the following methods to remove and add attributes.

Mutating Methods of a Node Object

An instance n of class Node supplies the following methods to remove, add, and replace children.

Output Methods of a Node Object ...