Alternatives to XML?

[Frank Millman]

"Peter Otten"  wrote in message news:npn25e$s5n$1 at blaine.gmane.org...

Frank Millman wrote:

>> As you have to keep the "<", why bother?
>
> If you mean why don't I convert the '<' to '<', the answer is that I do
> - I just omitted to say so. However, explicit is better than implicit :-)

> Doesn't that make the XML document invalid or changes it in an 
> irreversible way? How would you know whether

"<foo><bar/></foo>"

started out as

"<foo><bar/></foo>"

or

"<foo><bar/></foo>"

?

I cheat ;-)

It is *my* XML, and I know that I only use the offending characters inside 
attributes, and attributes are the only place where double-quote marks are 
allowed.

So this is my conversion routine -

lines = string.split('"')  # split on attributes
for pos, line in enumerate(lines):
    if pos%2:  # every 2nd line is an attribute
        lines[pos] = line.replace('<', '<').replace('>', '>')
return '"'.join(lines)

Frank