how to get Python to insert special characters in an xml file?

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Jul 15, 2011, at 7:53 AM, hackingKK wrote:

> Hello all.
> I am currently developing a python application which reads and writes some data to an xml file.
> I use the elementTree library for doing this.
> My simple question is that if I have some thing like & as in "kk & company " as organisation name, how can I have Python take this as a litteral string including the & sign and put in the <orgname> </orgname> tag?
> Even same applies while reading the file.  I would like to have the & come as a part of the literal string.

Hi Krishnakant,
You don't need to do anything special to insert metacharacters like & and < and > into XML using ElementTree. Just treat them as normal text and ElementTree will change them to entity references (&, etc.) when it writes your file to disk. 

If you're having a specific problem with this, post some code.

Cheers
Philip