Printing each attribute with newline using Element from lxml

Question

I am trying to print XML out of an Element object, so that formatting allows us to print the tag attributes in new line.

    elem = etree.Element()  //Some element
    str = etree.tostring(elem, pretty_print=True)

The current output looks like

    <module name="A" description="abc" type="xyz">
        <container/>
    </module>

Formatting needed

    <module 
      name="A" 
      description="abc" 
      type="xyz">
      <container/>
    </module>

Is there any existing library that allows us to print newlines for all the attributes present in the tags.

Salto

Answer 1

Etree cannot format attributes like that to my knowledge.

Alternatively, you could try tidylib(http://www.html-tidy.org/) to do the formatting.

On Ubuntu you can do:

sudo apt install tidy
sudo pip install tidylib

Then to format with each attribute on a new line try something like:

>>> from tidylib import tidy_document
>>> k = """<module name="A" description="abc" type="xyz">
        <container/>
    </module>
"""
>>> document, errors = tidy_document(k, options={'indent-attributes':'yes', 'input-xml':'yes'})
>>> print(document)
<module name="A"
        description="abc"
        type="xyz">
  <container />
</module>

Tidy is a vast library with many features and you can read more about the indent-attributes feature here: http://api.html-tidy.org/tidy/quickref_5.6.0.html#indent-attributes

Jumada

Close, but the it leaves the first attribute on the same line, and then aligns with the start there. This gives uneven indentations depending on the length of the tag name. – Marrowbone