Get string source of Python xml ElementTree

Question

How would you get the source of an ElementTree as a string in Python?

Liberate

Answer 1

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(source)
root = tree.getroot()
ET.tostring(root)

Note that there may be formatting differences between the content of source and ET.tostring(doc).

Albertinaalbertine

'ElementTree' object has no attribute 'tostring' happens when I tried this – Liberate

@James: then you are calling it on the wrong object. It's the module that has that method. – Disbelieve

@James: You are right that ET.tostring(tree) does not work if tree is an ElementTree (my mistake). Instead, get the root of the tree with root = tree.getroot(), and then call ET.tostring(root). – Albertinaalbertine

@MartijnPieters Yes! Thank you for pointing that out. I will accept as soon as I can – Liberate

Answer 2

I know it is not, but I wonder why it wouldn't be:

tree.tostring(root)

instead of the current way:

xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring(root)

Mammillary