Comments on: Fixing minidom.toprettyxml’s Silly Whitespace

By: Thomas Pluempe

Thomas Pluempe — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:59:37 +0000

Thanks for the fixed_writexml fix, made my day. I’m using this successfully with Python 2.6.

However, there’s a tiny bug there: In line 20, that’s the “writer.write(”<%s”%(newl))” line, the less than sign should be a greater than sign.

Only with this fix does it generate valid XML.

Response from Ron: Thomas, thanks for pointing out the typo! I’ve fixed it in the post. Much appreciated,
Ron

By: gmolleda

gmolleda — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:39:40 +0000

Hi, I have fixed other problem [in minidom]:
When you use the writexml function for write a beautiful and readable file, and read the file, and other time use writexml function, then you could view a lot of ugly newline characters.

Adding a new conditional in the loop “for”, we could remove the blank lines with only indent and newline characters

for node in self.childNodes: + if node.nodeType is not xml.dom.minidom.Node.TEXT_NODE: # 3: + node.writexml(writer,indent+addindent,addindent,newl) - #node.writexml(writer,indent+addindent,addindent,newl)

By: gmolleda

gmolleda — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:08:56 +0000

Hi, if you add a conditional in loop for, the extra newline character is not added in next calls to function:
writer.write(">%s" % (newl)) for node in self.childNodes: + if node.nodeType is not xml.dom.minidom.Node.TEXT_NODE: # 3: node.writexml(writer,indent+addindent,addindent,newl)

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:05:20 +0000

gmodella, thanks for your feedback. You’re right, the code as published wasn’t working, because Wordpress converted my “” to html tag delimiters, instead of converting them to “<” and “>”. (Notice that it did the same thing in your comment; your ‘write.write(”%s%s”…’ should have a , but Wordpress stripped them in your comment as well.)

I’ve fixed it manually, and now Wordpress is rendering it correctly. Thank you for alerting me!

By: gmolleda

gmolleda — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:03:20 +0000

I have found errors in fixed_writexml function:
1.- Errors in number %s into strings
2.- Errors in ending labels, the functions write label and not

The correct is:

def fixed_writexml(self, writer, indent=”", addindent=”", newl=”"):
# indent = current indentation
# addindent = indentation to add to higher levels
# newl = newline string
writer.write(indent+”")
self.childNodes[0].writexml(writer, “”, “”, “” )
writer.write(”%s” % (self.tagName, newl))
return
writer.write(”>%s” % (newl))
for node in self.childNodes:
node.writexml(writer,indent+addindent,addindent,newl)
writer.write(”%s%s” % (indent,self.tagName,newl))
else:
writer.write(”/>%s”%(newl))

# replace minidom’s function with ours
xml.dom.minidom.Element.writexml = fixed_writexml

By: Ron

Ron — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:07:26 +0000

Yikes, I just came across a better solution on comp.lang.python: use xml.dom.ext.PrettyPrint. I've updated the main post to reflect this option. (See #4.)