I’m currently trying to build a function that exports some data as XML. The code does output with no errors, but all of the XML is on a single line. Any ideas?

from lxml import etree   def exportAsXML(filename):     fields = [         ('Realm', 'Midgard'),         ('ActiveState', 'Dropped'),         ('Name', 'Test Item'),         ('Type', 'Bracer'),         ('Level', '50'),         ('Quality', '100'),         ('Bonus', '35'),         ('AFDPS', ''),         ('Speed', ''),         ('Origin', 'Quest'),         ('DamageType', ''),         ('LeftHand', ''),         ('Requirement', 'Level 50'),         ('Notes', '')     ]      root = etree.Element('Item')         for key, value in fields:             if value != '':                 etree.SubElement(root, key).text = value      document = open(filename, 'wb')     document.write(etree.tostring(root, encoding='UTF-8', pretty_print = True))     document.close()   exportAsXML('output.xml') 

What I’ve tried:

I have appended .decode('UTF-8') to the end of the write statement which DOES output correctly:

<Item>     <Realm>Midgard</Realm>     ... </Item> 

However, it was suggested that I shouldn’t have to do this.

Looking over the LXML documentation I read the tidbit about pretty_print not working because the original document contained formatting that needed to be stripped first, but I’m not parsing this from another XML document, so I don’t see how that applies.