Stripping spaces between XML nodes with Python

Question

Is there a easy way to accomplish the same thing in Python as xsl accomplishes with:

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

So for instance in the following

for event, elem in ElementTree.iterparse("/tmp/example.xml"):
    if elem.tag == "example":
        print ElementTree.tostring(elem)

when the example nodes are printed out all the spaces and line feeds in the input file between children of the example node will be removed?

Answer 1

I believe you need to explicitly manipulate the subtree to strip every text and tail:

from xml.etree import ElementTree

for event, elem in ElementTree.iterparse("/tmp/example.xml"):
    if elem.tag == "example":
        subiter = ElementTree.ElementTree(elem).getiterator()
        for x in subiter:
          if x.text: x.text = x.text.strip()
          if x.tail: x.tail = x.tail.strip()
        print ElementTree.tostring(elem)