I need to escape special characters in an invalid XML file which is about 5000 lines long. Here's an example of the XML that I have to deal with:
<root>
<element>
<name>name & surname</name>
<mail>[email protected]</mail>
</element>
</root>
Here the problem is the character "&" in the name. How would you escape special characters like this with a Python library? I didn't find a way to do it with BeautifulSoup.
If you don't care about invalid characters in the xml you could use XML parser's recover option (see Parsing broken XML with lxml.etree.iterparse):
from lxml import etree
parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True) # recover from bad characters.
root = etree.fromstring(broken_xml, parser=parser)
print etree.tostring(root)
<root>
<element>
<name>name surname</name>
<mail>[email protected]</mail>
</element>
</root>
You're probably just wanting to do some simple regexp-ery on the HTML before throwing it into BeautifulSoup.
Even simpler, if there aren't any SGML entities (&...;) in the code, html=html.replace('&','&') will do the trick.
Otherwise, try this:
x ="<html><h1>Fish & Chips & Gravy</h1><p>Fish & Chips & Gravy</p>"
import re
q=re.sub(r'&([^a-zA-Z#])',r'&\1',x)
print q
Essentially the regex looks for & not followed by alpha-numeric or # characters. It won't deal with ampersands at the end of lines, but that's probably fixable.
This answer provides XML sanitizer functions, although they don't escape the unescaped characters, but simply drop them instead.
The question wondered how to do it with Beautiful Soup. Here is a function which will sanitize a small XML bytes object with it. It was tested with the package requirements beautifulsoup4==4.8.0 and lxml==4.4.0. Note that lxml is required here by bs4.
import xml.etree.ElementTree
import bs4
def sanitize_xml(content: bytes) -> bytes:
# Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57450722/
try:
xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(content)
except xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError:
return bs4.BeautifulSoup(content, features='lxml-xml').encode()
return content # already valid XML
Obviously there is not much of a point in using both bs4 and lxml when this can be done with lxml alone. This lxml==4.4.0 using sanitizer function is essentially derived from the answer by jfs.
import lxml.etree
def sanitize_xml(content: bytes) -> bytes:
# Ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57450722/
try:
lxml.etree.fromstring(content)
except lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError:
root = lxml.etree.fromstring(content, parser=lxml.etree.XMLParser(recover=True))
return lxml.etree.tostring(root)
return content # already valid XML
<name>name & surname</name>
is not well-formed XML. It should be:
<name>name & surname</name>
All conformant XML tools should create this - you normally do not have to worry. If you create a string with the '&' character then an XML tool will output the escaped version. If you create the string by hand it is your responsibility to make sure it is escaped. If you use an XML editor it should escape it for you.
If the file has been given you by someone else, send it back and tell them it is not well-formed. If they no longer exist you will have to use a plain text editor. That's fragile and messy but there is no other way. If the file has ampersands elsewhere that are used for escaping then the file is garbage.
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