How do I get Python's ElementTree to pretty print to an XML file?



Background


I am using SQLite to access a database and retrieve the desired information. I'm using ElementTree in Python version 2.6 to create an XML file with that information.


Code



import sqlite3
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

# NOTE: Omitted code where I acccess the database,
# pull data, and add elements to the tree

tree = ET.ElementTree(root)

# Pretty printing to Python shell for testing purposes
from xml.dom import minidom
print minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml(indent = " ")

####### Here lies my problem #######
tree.write("New_Database.xml")


Attempts


I've tried using tree.write("New_Database.xml", "utf-8") in place of the last line of code above, but it did not edit the XML's layout at all - it's still a jumbled mess.


I also decided to fiddle around and tried doing:

tree = minidom.parseString(ET.tostring(root)).toprettyxml(indent = " ")
instead of printing this to the Python shell, which gives the error AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'write'.


Questions


When I write my tree to an XML file on the last line, is there a way to pretty print to the XML file as it does to the Python shell?


Can I use toprettyxml() here or is there a different way to do this?




Thanks in advance!


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