How do you create a non-nested xml element using Python's lxml.objectify?

Question

My current code is

xml_obj = lxml.objectify.Element('root_name')
xml_obj[root_name] = str('text')
lxml.etree.tostring(xml_obj)

but this creates the following xml:

<root_name><root_name>text</root_name></root_name>

In the application I am using this for I could easily use text substitution to solve this problem, but it would be nice to know how to do it using the library.

Answer 1

I'm not that familiar with objectify, but i don't think that's the way it's intended to be used. The way it represents objects, is that a node at any given level is, say, a classname, and the subnodes are field names (with types) and values. And the normal way to use it would be something more like this:

xml_obj = lxml.objectify.Element('xml_obj')
xml_obj.root_path = 'text'
etree.dump(xml_obj)
<root_name xmlns:py="http://codespeak.net/lxml/objectify/pytype" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" py:pytype="TREE">
  <root_name py:pytype="str">text</root_name>
</root_name>

What you want would be way easier to do with etree:

xml_obj = lxml.etree.Element('root_path')
xml_obj.text = 'text'
etree.dump(xml_obj)
<root_path>text</root_path>

If you really need it to be in objectify, it looks like while you shouldn't mix directly, you can use tostring to generate XML, then objectify.fromstring to bring it back. But probably, if this is what you want, you should just use etree to generate it.

Answer 2

I don't think you can write data into the root element. You may need to create a child element like this:

xml_obj = lxml.objectify.Element('root_name')
xml_obj.child_name = str('text')
lxml.etree.tostring(xml_obj)