How to Efficiently Create XML Files in Python: ElementTree, cElementTree, or LXML?

How to Create XML Files in Python

To create XML files in Python, consider the following options:

ElementTree (Recommended)

ElementTree, introduced in Python 2.5, is a straightforward and efficient choice. It includes three sub-options:

• ElementTree: Basic pure-Python implementation.
• cElementTree: Optimized C implementation, deprecated in Python 3.3.
• LXML: Extends ElementTree with advanced features like XPath and CSS selectors.

Example Using cElementTree:

<code class="python">import xml.etree.cElementTree as ET

root = ET.Element("root")
doc = ET.SubElement(root, "doc")

ET.SubElement(doc, "field1", name="blah").text = "some value1"
ET.SubElement(doc, "field2", name="asdfasd").text = "some vlaue2"

tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
tree.write("filename.xml")</code>

Additional Resources:

• [Python Standard Library API Docs](https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html)
• [ElementTree Tutorial](https://effbot.org/zone/elementtree.htm)

Performance Considerations:

• LXML excels in serializing XML (generating) but is slower for parsing due to extra features.
• cElementTree is optimized for parsing and can handle large XML files more efficiently than LXML.

For basic XML generation tasks, ElementTree with cElementTree or LXML is sufficient. If extreme performance is crucial, benchmark tests suggest LXML for serialization and cElementTree for parsing.

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