Creating a Unicode XML from scratch with Python 3.2

python, python-3.x, unicode, xml, xml.etree

Solution

In my opinion, the `ElementTree` is a good choice. If you need a bit more capable package in future, you can switch to the third party `lxml` module that uses the same interface.

The answer to your problem can be found in the doc http://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree.write

The output is either a string (str) or binary (bytes). This is controlled by the encoding argument. If encoding is "unicode", the output is a string; otherwise, it’s binary. Note that this may conflict with the type of file if it’s an open file object; make sure you do not try to write a string to a binary stream and vice versa.

Basically, you are doing it correctly. You `open()` the file in a text mode, this way the file accepts the strings and you neet to use the `'unicode'` argument for the `tree.write()`. Otherwise, you could open the file in binary mode (no encoding argument in the `open()`) and use the `'utf-8'` in the `tree.write()`.

A bit cleaned-up code that works on its own:

#!python3
from xml.etree import ElementTree as et

def dict_to_elem(dictionary):
    item = et.Element('Item')
    for key in dictionary:
        field = et.Element(key.replace(' ',''))
        field.text = dictionary[key]
        item.append(field)
    return item

root = et.Element('AllItems')     # create the element first...
tree = et.ElementTree(root)       # and pass it to the created tree

root.append(dict_to_elem(  {'some_tag':'Hello World', 'xxx': 'yyy'}  ))
# Lather, rinse, repeat this append step as needed

filename = 'a.xml'
with open(filename, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    tree.write(file, encoding='unicode')

# The alternative is...    
fname = 'b.xml'
with open(fname, 'wb') as f:
    tree.write(f, encoding='utf-8')

It depends on the purpose. Of the two, I personally prefer the first solution. It clearly says that you write a text file (and the XML is a text file).

But the simplest alternative where you do not need to tell the encoding is just to pass the file name to the `tree.write` like this:

tree.write('c.xml', encoding='utf-8')

It opens the file, writes the content using the given encoding (updated after the Sebastian's comment below), and closes the file. And you can read it easily and you can do no mistake here.

Problem

Original source