Alternatives to XML?

[Joonas Liik]

On 26 August 2016 at 08:22, Frank Millman <frank at chagford.com> wrote:
> "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
>
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

or.. you could just escape all & as & before escaping the > and <,
and do the reverse on decode