Creating a simple XML file using python

For the simplest choice, I’d go with minidom: http://docs.python.org/library/xml.dom.minidom.html . It is built in to the python standard library and is straightforward to use in simple cases.

Here’s a pretty easy to follow tutorial: http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/XML_intro.html

The lxml library includes a very convenient syntax for XML generation, called the E-factory. Here’s how I’d make the example you give:

#!/usr/bin/python
import lxml.etree
import lxml.builder    

E = lxml.builder.ElementMaker()
ROOT = E.root
DOC = E.doc
FIELD1 = E.field1
FIELD2 = E.field2

the_doc = ROOT(
        DOC(
            FIELD1('some value1', name='blah'),
            FIELD2('some value2', name='asdfasd'),
            )   
        )   

print lxml.etree.tostring(the_doc, pretty_print=True)

Output:

<root>
  <doc>
    <field1 name="blah">some value1</field1>
    <field2 name="asdfasd">some value2</field2>
  </doc>
</root>

It also supports adding to an already-made node, e.g. after the above you could say

the_doc.append(FIELD2('another value again', name='hithere'))

Yattag http://www.yattag.org/ or https://github.com/leforestier/yattag provides an interesting API to create such XML document (and also HTML documents).

It’s using context manager and with keyword.

from yattag import Doc, indent

doc, tag, text = Doc().tagtext()

with tag('root'):
    with tag('doc'):
        with tag('field1', name='blah'):
            text('some value1')
        with tag('field2', name='asdfasd'):
            text('some value2')

result = indent(
    doc.getvalue(),
    indentation = ' '*4,
    newline = 'rn'
)

print(result)

so you will get:

<root>
    <doc>
        <field1 name="blah">some value1</field1>
        <field2 name="asdfasd">some value2</field2>
    </doc>
</root>

For such a simple XML structure, you may not want to involve a full blown XML module. Consider a string template for the simplest structures, or Jinja for something a little more complex. Jinja can handle looping over a list of data to produce the inner xml of your document list. That is a bit trickier with raw python string templates

For a Jinja example, see my answer to a similar question.

Here is an example of generating your xml with string templates.

import string
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape

inner_template = string.Template('    <field${id} name="${name}">${value}</field${id}>')

outer_template = string.Template("""<root>
 <doc>
${document_list}
 </doc>
</root>
 """)

data = [
    (1, 'foo', 'The value for the foo document'),
    (2, 'bar', 'The <value> for the <bar> document'),
]

inner_contents = [inner_template.substitute(id=id, name=name, value=escape(value)) for (id, name, value) in data]
result = outer_template.substitute(document_list='n'.join(inner_contents))
print result

Output:

<root>
 <doc>
    <field1 name="foo">The value for the foo document</field1>
    <field2 name="bar">The &lt;value&gt; for the &lt;bar&gt; document</field2>
 </doc>
</root>

The downer of the template approach is that you won’t get escaping of < and > for free. I danced around that problem by pulling in a util from xml.sax

I just finished writing an xml generator, using bigh_29’s method of Templates … it’s a nice way of controlling what you output without too many Objects getting ‘in the way’.

As for the tag and value, I used two arrays, one which gave the tag name and position in the output xml and another which referenced a parameter file having the same list of tags. The parameter file, however, also has the position number in the corresponding input (csv) file where the data will be taken from.
This way, if there’s any changes to the position of the data coming in from the input file, the program doesn’t change; it dynamically works out the data field position from the appropriate tag in the parameter file.