[UPDATED] Finally xml.dom.minidom sucks balls, it can burn up to hundreds/gigs of megabytes of sweet memory when working with “large” xml files (10 Mb or more). See this post for a really lightweight implementation.

Howdy,

Here is a quick reference of how to create an XML document and output it in Python.

import xml.dom.minidom

# create the document
doc = xml.dom.minidom.Document()

# populate it with an element
root = doc.createElement("teabag")
doc.appendChild(root)

# time to give some children to the root element, one with an attribute for instance
child1 = doc.createElement("spam")
child1.setAttribute("name", "value")
root.appendChild(child1)

# and another one with some text
child2 = doc.createElement("eggs")
text = doc.createTextNode("spam and eggs!")
child2.appendChild(text)
root.appendChild(child2)

# let's get the output, as a string
print doc.toprettyxml()

# you're supposed to get the following output:
#<?xml version="1.0" ?>
#<teabag>
#    <spam name="value"/>
#    <eggs>
#        spam and eggs!
#    </eggs>
#</teabag>

How nice is that ? Yep, a lot.