Do Not Collapse Empty Nodes In XML Output

I'm using python's xml.etree.ElementTree to represent an XML document. I want to output it to text but I want to keep empty elements (elements with no children) expanded, instead o

Solution 1:

You can pass method="html" to the tostring() call.

Demo:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
>>> data = """
... <root>
...     <person/>
...     <person></person>
... </root>
... """
>>> tree = etree.fromstring(data)
>>> print etree.tostring(tree, method="html")
<root>
    <person></person>
    <person></person>
</root>

Solution 2:

Just use: ElementTree.tostring(element, short_empty_elements=False)