Keep lxml from creating self-closing tags
It seems like the <STATUS>
tag gets assigned a text
attribute of None
:
>>> tree[0]
<Element STATUS at 0x11708d4d0>
>>> tree[0].text
>>> tree[0].text is None
True
If you set the text
attribute of the <STATUS>
tag to an empty string, you should get what you're looking for:
>>> tree[0].text = ''
>>> etree.tostring(tree)
'<ERROR>The status is <STATUS></STATUS>.</ERROR>'
With this is mind, you can probably walk a DOM tree and fix up text
attributes before writing out your XML. Something like this:
# prevent creation of self-closing tags
for node in tree.iter():
if node.text is None:
node.text = ''
If you tostring lxml dom is HTML
, you can use
etree.tostring(html_dom, method='html')
to prevent self-closing tag like <a />