BeautifulSoup: how to enable output encoding?

Question

I would like to include an encoding tag in an XML document using BeautifulSoup.BeautifulStoneSoup , but I'm not sure how to do this.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <mytag>stuff</mytag> 

It outputs an encoding tag when I read a document that already has it, but I make a new soup.

Thanks!

Edit: I will give an example of what I am doing now.

 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup, Tag soup = BeautifulStoneSoup() mytag = Tag(soup, 'mytag') soup.append(mytag) str(soup) # '<mytag></mytag>' soup.prettify() # No encoding given # '<mytag>\n</mytag>' soup.prettify(encoding='UTF-8') # '<mytag>\n</mytag>' # Where the encoding? 

Even if I create a soup like BeautifulStoneSoup(fromEncoding='UTF-8') , there is still no <?xml?> Tag.

Is there any other way to get this tag without creating and passing the tag as a string directly or is this the only way?

Answer 1

Do you mean something like this?

 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup soup = BeautifulStoneSoup('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>') # make some more soup 

Or,

 soup = BeautifulStoneSoup() # make some more soup soup.insert(0, '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>') 

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From BeautifulSoup documentation :

Beautiful Soup tries to turn your document into Unicode in coding order:

• The encoding you pass as the fromEncoding argument to the soup constructor.
• The encoding found in the document itself: for example, in the XML declaration or (for HTML documents) the META-http-equiv tag. If Beautiful Soup finds this kind of encoding inside the document, it again analyzes the document from the very beginning and gives a new encoding. The only exception is if you explicitly specified an encoding, and this encoding really worked: then it will ignore any encoding found in the document.
• The coding snorted, looking at the first few bytes of the file. If encoding is detected at this stage, it will be one of the encodings UTF- *, EBCDIC or ASCII.
• The encoding sniffed by the font library, if installed.
• Utf-8
• Windows-1252

A beautiful soup will almost always guess correctly, if at all. But for documents without declarations and in strange encodings, he often will not be able to guess.

NB item # 2, which I read as: BeautifulSoup will automatically use the encoding in the xml declaration unless you explicitly specify one of the arguments fromEncoding. YMMV.

The previous referenced documentation has other, potentially useful, unicode examples.

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Edit : @TorelTwiddler, if there is another way to add an xml declaration using BeautifulSoup without passing the tag as a string directly, I don't know about that.

However, consider the following:

 soup = BeautifulStoneSoup('<?xml version="1.0" encoding=""?>') # <- no encoding mytag = Tag(soup, 'mytag') soup.append(mytag) print str(soup) # "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?><mytag></mytag>" # Wha!? :) print soup.prettify(encoding='euc-jp') # <?xml version='1.0' encoding='euc-jp'?> # <mytag> # </mytag> 

Perhaps this will help you get where you want to go.