Full Tag In To_xml Pandas In Any Case

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Problem Description:

I have a code like this:

    data_to_string = data_from_table.to_xml(path_or_buffer= file_name + ".xml", index=False,
                                            root_name="convoy", row_name="vehicle", xml_declaration=False)

It works fine with files containing several rows but if there is nothing to export, i have only

<convoy/>

in my .xml.

How can I fix the code to have:

<convoy>
</convoy>

in any cases?

Solution – 1

This behavior is hard-coded into the xml-library.

Your requirement can be fulfilled by checking whether there are rows in your dataframe and, if not, by creating an empty html-string (here and here) instead and writing that to the output.

Be aware that <convoy/> and <convoy></convoy> are equivalent in xml.

Here is a fully working example:

import pandas as pd
from lxml import etree

file_name = "test"
path = file_name + ".xml"
root_name = "convoy"
row_name = "vehicle"

data_from_table = pd.DataFrame()
if len(data_from_table.index) > 0:
    data_to_string = data_from_table.to_xml(
        path_or_buffer=path,
        index=False,
        root_name=root_name,
        row_name=row_name,
        xml_declaration=False,
    )
else:
    elem = etree.Element(root_name)
    empty_xml = etree.tostring(elem, method="html", encoding="unicode")
    with open(path, "w") as f:
        f.write(empty_xml)

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