Best way to generate xml?

I would use the yattag library.

from yattag import Doc

doc, tag, text = Doc().tagtext()

with tag('food'):
    with tag('name'):
        text('French Breakfast')
    with tag('price', currency='USD'):
        text('6.95')
    with tag('ingredients'):
        for ingredient in ('baguettes', 'jam', 'butter', 'croissants'):
            with tag('ingredient'):
                text(ingredient)
    

print(doc.getvalue())

FYI I'm the author of the library.

ElementTree is a good module for reading xml and writing too e.g.

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element, SubElement, tostring

root = Element('root')
child = SubElement(root, "child")
child.text = "I am a child"

print(tostring(root))

Output:

<root><child>I am a child</child></root>

See this tutorial for more details and how to pretty print.

Alternatively if your XML is simple, do not underestimate the power of string formatting :)

xmlTemplate = """<root>
    <person>
        <name>%(name)s</name>
        <address>%(address)s</address>
     </person>
</root>"""

data = {'name':'anurag', 'address':'Pune, india'}
print xmlTemplate%data

Output:

<root>
    <person>
        <name>anurag</name>
        <address>Pune, india</address>
     </person>
</root>

You can use string.Template or some template engine too, for complex formatting.

Using lxml:

from lxml import etree

# create XML 
root = etree.Element('root')
root.append(etree.Element('child'))
# another child with text
child = etree.Element('child')
child.text = 'some text'
root.append(child)

# pretty string
s = etree.tostring(root, pretty_print=True)
print s

Output:

<root>
  <child/>
  <child>some text</child>
</root>

See the tutorial for more information.