Getting the right indentation of an XML file

After sending a request to an url using python and the library requests, i am writing the output in an xml file just like this:

export = s.post(url, params=params)
soup = BeautifulSoup(export.text, features='xml')

with open('exit.xml', 'wb') as f_out:  
     f_out.write(soup.encode('utf-8'))

But as an output in my xml file, i’m getting something like this :

<complex>
<real>4.4E+12</real>
<imaginary>5.4E-11</imaginary>
</complex>

With no indentation at all ! the ouput i expected would be something more like this :

<complex>
  <real>4.4E+12</real>
  <imaginary>5.4E-11</imaginary>
</complex>

so i read about xmlformatter and tried :

import xmlformatter

formatter = xmlformatter.Formatter(indent="1", indent_char="\t", encoding_output="ISO-8859-1", 
preserve=["literal"])
formatter.format_file("exit.xml")

But it didn’t work. Maybe indentation is not needed but i’m also asking this for my personal knowledge. Any ideas or help would be very appreciated!

>Solution :

Pretty printing XML in Python

XML as a file format doesn’t need to be indented, and so the lib does’t bother. However, if you want to "pretty print" your xml, see the link above.