Pretty print in lxml is failing when I add tags to a parsed tree
It has to do with how lxml treats whitespace -- see the lxml FAQ for details.
To fix this, change the loading part of the file to the following:
parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)root = etree.parse('file.xml', parser).getroot()I didn't test it, but it should indent your file just fine with this change.
I was having the same issue when writing to files, for anyone else with this issue:
I created a helper function that pretty_prints after I run my main function.
from lxml import etreedef ppxml(xml): parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True) tree = etree.parse(xml, parser) tree.write(xml, encoding='utf-8', pretty_print=True, xml_declaration=True)In in my main program file
if __name__ == '__main__': main() ppxml(xml)