Allow to skip XML declaration in minidom's toprettyxml / toxml / writexml

[G-Guillard]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

The XML declaration is currently hardcoded in Document.writexml(), which is in turn called by toxml() and toprettyxml().

It is often convenient to use these functions to parse XML which purpose is to be inserted in another XML document, but one has to get rid of the declaration set by writexml().

It would be handy and trivial to add a default xml_declaration=True parameter, which would skip the declaration when set to False.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[picnixz]

Wouldn't https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html#xml.etree.ElementTree.ElementTree.write be sufficient for your needs? I'm not sure we want to change the API of minidom which was meant to be minimalistic.

EDIT: The minidom's docs say:

It is intended to be simpler than the full DOM and also significantly smaller. Users who are not already proficient with the DOM should consider using the xml.etree.ElementTree module for their XML processing instead.

So I'm really unusure about extending the functionalities of minidom. In addition writexml is meant to write... XML and not a "half" XML I'd say (semantics are important here)

[G-Guillard]

It is sufficient indeed, with the help of ElementTree.indent for pretty printing. Thanks !

[picnixz]

Closing as not planned for now, but the feature request was legitimate though.