Generating xml in python and lxml

@sukbir is probably not using Windows. What happens is that lxml writes a newline (0A 00 in UTF-16LE) between the XML header and the body. This is then molested by Win text mode to become 0D 0A 00 which makes everything after that look like UTF-16BE hence the Chinese etc characters when you display it. You can get around this in this instance by using "wb" instead of "w" when you open the file. However I'd strongly suggest that you use 'UTF-8' (spelled EXACTLY like that) as your encoding. Why are you using UTF-16? You like large files and/or weird problems?

Save to XML file

doc.write('output.xml', xml_declaration=True, encoding='utf-16') 

outFile = open('output.xml', 'w') doc.write(outFile, xml_declaration=True, encoding='utf-16') 

Will this respect XML indentation? I am creating the XML file in a similar fashion. But having issues in formatting whenever I add a element. If I modifytag or modify text and write back to a new xml file it works fine. Don't know with additions it's not working. Here is the format:testtest1test1

Promoting my comment to an answer:

@sukbir is probably not using Windows. What happens is that lxml writes a newline (0A 00 in UTF-16LE) between the XML header and the body. This is then molested by Win text mode to become 0D 0A 00 which makes everything after that look like UTF-16BE hence the Chinese etc characters when you display it. You can get around this in this instance by using "wb" instead of "w" when you open the file. However I'd strongly suggest that you use 'UTF-8' (spelled EXACTLY like that) as your encoding. Why are you using UTF-16? You like large files and/or weird problems?

Unfortunately the "wb" didn't solve this issue for me, but the newlines were the cause, so was able to work around the issue by writing the xml on one line (no pretty_print) and manually adding the declaration. On the question of "Why are you using UTF-16? You like large files and/or weird problems?" it could be (as in my case) that a 3rd party required a file in UTF-16. If you deal with other interfaces from other parties then you don't always have control over what you send them.

• python
• xml
• lxml