Hi,

Did you look at lxml (http://lxml.de)?

from lxml.builder import E
from lxml import etree

tree = etree.ElementTree(
    E.Hello(
        "Good morning!",
        E.World("How do you do", humour = "excellent"),
        "Fine",
        E.Goodbye(),
        ),
    )

print(etree.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True).decode())

# output, even more prettified

<Hello>
    Good morning!
    <World humour="excellent">
          How do you do
    </World>
          Fine
    <Goodbye/>
</Hello>

By the way, your Element enhancement is buggy, because all newly create
elements will share the same attrib dictionary (if attrib is not given).
Notice that Donald Duck will be sad; by the time we print even Hello is sad.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree

class Element(etree.Element):
    def __init__(self, tag, attrib={}, **extra):
        super().__init__(tag)
        self.tag = tag
        self.attrib = attrib
        self.attrib.update(extra)
        self.text = self.attrib.pop('text', None)
        self.tail = self.attrib.pop('tail', None)
        self._children = []

if __name__ == '__main__':

    test = Element('Hello',)
    test2 = Element('World',{'humour':'excelent'},text = 'How do you do',
tail="Fine")
    test3 = Element('Goodbye', humour='sad')
    test4 = Element('Donaldduck')
    test.append(test2)
    test.append(test3)
    test.append(test4)
    tree = etree.ElementTree(test)
    print(etree.tostring(test, encoding="utf-8", method="xml"))

<Hello humour="sad">
    <World humour="excelent">How do you do</World>Fine
    <Goodbye humour="sad" />
    <Donaldduck humour="sad" />
</Hello>'

The correct idiom would be:

    def __init__(self, tag, attrib=None, **extra):
        if attrib is None:
            attrib = {}
        super().__init__(tag)

Cheers,

Patrick

2012/1/16 Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <report@bugs.python.org>

>
> Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
> Touché :-)
> I was just frustrated because my XMLs never have tail or text as
> attributes and I wanted to have more compact code...
>
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 12:14 PM, patrick vrijlandt
> <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> >
> > patrick vrijlandt <patrick.vrijlandt@gmail.com> added the comment:
> >
> > I agree the Element syntax is sometimes awkward.
> >
> > But how would you represent text or tail attributes within this enhanced
> element?
> > <animal name="cat" tail="yes"> comes to mind ...
> >
> > ----------
> > nosy: +patrick.vrijlandt
> >
> > _______________________________________
> > Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> > <http://bugs.python.org/issue13796>
> > _______________________________________
>
> ----------
>
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue13796>
> _______________________________________
>