How to create <!DOCTYPE> with Python's cElementTree

You could set xml_declaration argument on write function to False, so output won't have xml declaration with encoding, then just append what header you need manually. Actually if you set your encoding as 'utf-8' (lowercase), xml declaration won't be added too.

import xml.etree.cElementTree as ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.Element('tmx', {'version': '1.4a'})
ElementTree.SubElement(tree, 'header', {'adminlang': 'EN'})
ElementTree.SubElement(tree, 'body')

with open('myfile.tmx', 'wb') as f:
    f.write('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><!DOCTYPE tmx SYSTEM "tmx14a.dtd">'.encode('utf8'))
    ElementTree.ElementTree(tree).write(f, 'utf-8')

Resulting file (newlines added manually for readability):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE tmx SYSTEM "tmx14a.dtd">
<tmx version="1.4a">
    <header adminlang="EN" />
    <body />
</tmx>

You could use lxml and its tostring function:

from lxml import etree

s = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tmx version="1.4a"/>""" 

tree = etree.fromstring(s)
header = etree.SubElement(tree,'header',{'adminlang': 'EN'})
body = etree.SubElement(tree,'body')

print etree.tostring(tree, encoding="UTF-8",
                     xml_declaration=True,
                     pretty_print=True,
                     doctype='<!DOCTYPE tmx SYSTEM "tmx14a.dtd">')

=>

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE tmx SYSTEM "tmx14a.dtd">
<tmx version="1.4a">
  <header adminlang="EN"/>
  <body/>
</tmx>

Tags:

Python

Xml

Elementtree

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