How to create “virtual root” with Python's ElementTree?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1070772

  •  21-08-2019
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Question

I am trying to use Python's ElementTree to generate an XHTML file.

However, the ElementTree.Element() just lets me create a single tag (e.g., HTML). I need to create some sort of a virtual root or whatever it is called so that I can put the various , DOCTYPES, etc.

How do I do that? Thanks

Was it helpful?

Solution

I don't know if there's a better way but I've seen this done:

Create the base document as a string:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html></html>

Then parse that string to start your new document.

OTHER TIPS

I have/had the same problem. when i parse a document and write it back again the doctype defenition is not there anymore. but i found a solution browsing the documentation:

link text

Saving HTML Files #

To save a plain HTML file, just write out the tree.

tree.write("outfile.htm")

This works well, as long as the file doesn’t containg any embedded SCRIPT or STYLE tags.

If you want, you can add a DTD reference to the beginning of the file:

file = open("outfile.htm", "w")
file.write(DTD + "\n")
tree.write(file)
file.close()
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