Hi, Andreas requested a new feature that mainly relates to output formatting. The obvious API for it might be a new keyword argument. However, since we seem to be getting more and more keyword arguments in the I/O functions, maybe we should rethink the way we set options on output methods. Fredrik mentioned the possibility to have an XMLParser that only wrapps options like this: class XMLParser: def __init__(self, **options): self.options = options doc = ET.parse(source, parser=XMLParser(configuration)) What about doing the same with output options? Imagine this: class XMLFormatter: def __init__(self, xhtml=False, pretty_print=False, indent=4, ...): self.options = {} ... xml_text = ET.write_str(XMLFormatter(pretty_print=True)) That would give us a nice, symmetric API for input and output options. If you prefer, you could easily use sublasses to provide different default arguments: class XMLPrettyPrinter(XMLFormatter): def __init__(..., pretty_print=True, ...): Comments? Stefan