Howdy again,

Now let’s do some serious XML output in Python using cElementTree.

# this is included in Python 2.5+
from xml.etree.cElementTree import ElementTree, Element, dump

# let's create the root element
root = Element("teabag")

# give it a child with an attribute
child1 = Element("spam")
child1.attrib["name"] = "value"
root.append(child1)

# and a child with text content
child2 = Element("eggs")
child2.text = "spam and eggs"
root.append(child2)

# print the whole thing to stdout
dump(root)

# or to a file
ElementTree(root).write("teabag.xml")

See the author’s website for downloads and usage information of cElementTree.

Using this API, I was able to create a 47 Mb XML file in a few minutes, burning roughly 300 Mb of heap space. This XML file represents a graph of graphs, namely the control flow graph of each function of IDA Pro. Here are some screenshots, using yEd for the visualization part: