Is there a way to keep order of mixed and repeating tags?

Example 🍔

<DoubleCheeseburger>
    <Bread/>
    <Cheese/>
    <Beef/>
    <Cheese/>
    <Beef/>
    <Bread/>
</DoubleCheeseburger>

import xmltodict, json
data = xmltodict.parse(double_cheeseburger_xml)
print(json.dumps(data, indent=3))

{
   "DoubleCheeseburger": {
      "Bread": [
         null,
         null
      ],
      "Cheese": [
         null,
         null
      ],
      "Beef": [
         null,
         null
      ]
   }
}

Can we tell the order of each Bread, Cheese and Beef with respect to each other not only within the same tag, but also in the parent node (DoubleCheeseburger)?

If not, is there a way to monkeypatch to write it down?

[lindsay-stevens]

@andreif: I needed the same feature and wrote a patch for that, the branch is on my fork here: https://github.com/lindsay-stevens/xmltodict/tree/ordered-children-short-tags

It’s got a flag to deal with mixed child ordering on parse and unparse. During parse it’ll add an @order attribute, on unparse it’ll remove the attribute and sort the mixed nodes. Also has a bonus XHTML-ish feature to enable output of short-form of empty tags, e.g. “<tag/>” vs. “<tag></tag>”

Not opened a PR for it yet since my previous one is still open and I didn’t want to be annoying.

[andreif]

Some services do require certain order of children unfortunately.