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8.7.1 DOM Objects

The definition of the DOM API for Python is given as part of the `xml.dom` module documentation. This section lists the differences between the API and `xml.dom.minidom`.

`unlink`( | )

  Break internal references within the DOM so that it will be garbage collected on versions of Python without cyclic GC. Even when cyclic GC is available, using this can make large amounts of memory available sooner, so calling this on DOM objects as soon as they are no longer needed is good practice. This only needs to be called on the `Document` object, but may be called on child nodes to discard children of that node.

`writexml`( | writer[,indent=""[,addindent=""[,newl=""]]])

  Write XML to the writer object. The writer should have a `write()` method which matches that of the file object interface. The indent parameter is the indentation of the current node. The addindent parameter is the incremental indentation to use for subnodes of the current one. The newl parameter specifies the string to use to terminate newlines.

  Changed in version 2.1: The optional keyword parameters indent, addindent, and newl were added to support pretty output.

  Changed in version 2.3: For the `Document` node, an additional keyword argument encoding can be used to specify the encoding field of the XML header.

`toxml`( | [encoding])

  Return the XML that the DOM represents as a string.

  With no argument, the XML header does not specify an encoding, and the result is Unicode string if the default encoding cannot represent all characters in the document. Encoding this string in an encoding other than UTF-8 is likely incorrect, since UTF-8 is the default encoding of XML.

  With an explicit encoding argument, the result is a byte string in the specified encoding. It is recommended that this argument is always specified. To avoid `UnicodeError` exceptions in case of unrepresentable text data, the encoding argument should be specified as "utf-8".

  Changed in version 2.3: the encoding argument was introduced.

`toprettyxml`( | [indent[, newl]])

  Return a pretty-printed version of the document. indent specifies the indentation string and defaults to a tabulator; newl specifies the string emitted at the end of each line and defaults to `\n`.

  New in version 2.1. Changed in version 2.3: the encoding argument; see `toxml()`.

The following standard DOM methods have special considerations with `xml.dom.minidom`:

`cloneNode`( | deep)

  Although this method was present in the version of `xml.dom.minidom` packaged with Python 2.0, it was seriously broken. This has been corrected for subsequent releases.