Escaping strings for use in XML

Question

I'm using Python's xml.dom.minidom to create an XML document.

Can anyone tell me how to make it escape the strings provided by me so they won't be able to mess up the XML?

Answer 1

You can try the following:

from xml.dom.minidom import Text, Element

t = Text()
e = Element('p')

t.data = '<bar><a/><baz spam="eggs"> & blabla &entity;</>'
e.appendChild(t)
 

Then you will get nicely escaped XML string:

>>> e.toxml()
'<p>&lt;bar&gt;&lt;a/&gt;&lt;baz spam=&quot;eggs&quot;&gt; &amp; blabla &amp;entity;&lt;/&gt;</p>'