Please add toprettyxml

[pabigot]

Please add toprettyxml

[pabigot]

It's not particularly hard to do x.toDOM().toprettyxml() but yeah, I can see this might be worthwhile. I'll take a look after I deal with #26, but might not get to it for a while.

six.py: I didn't modify that line so you'd have to ask the authors, but it's probably just a leftover from it being a docstring in the past.

structures.py: fix queued. Thanks.

[zyv]

I second that toprettyxml() would be nice to have!

[pabigot]

After considering this carefully I'm going to decline the enhancement. The problem is that the existing toxml() method combines arguments meant to control the conversion of the PyXB instance to a DOM structure, and to control the conversion of the DOM structure to XML text. It has only one argument that affects the DOM-to-XML step, and is essentially mandatory, so fits naturally as the first argument with the instance-to-DOM arguments which are rarely used following it.

In contrast toprettyxml() introduces two additional options specific to the DOM-to-XML phase, and places them before the mandatory encoding argument, which would make correct usage difficult when instance-to-DOM arguments are needed.

In short, at this point I sorta regret adding toxml() as a short-hand in the first place, so am sticking to my original response that x.toDOM().toprettyxml() is the recommended path.

[zyv]

Maybe one could add an optional argument to toxml() as in pretty=False instead or that'd be problematic in some other way? Just wondering if you have also considered that...

[pabigot]

@zyv In fact, that's exactly how I started. But then, for pretty=True to be fully useful, I'd have to also add the indent and newl arguments which as I noted are in an inconsistent order relative to the existing encoding argument so they'd have to be keyword arguments too as there are already four parameters to toxml(). At that point I noticed that both functions are only available in minidom and PyXB isn't supposed to be restricted to a particular DOM implementation.

So trying to graft it in just got too messy: the best solution IMO is to convert to DOM, then use the native functions provided by the DOM implementation.