Alternatives to XML?

[Frank Millman]

"Joonas Liik"  wrote in message 
news:CAB1GNpQnJDENaA-GZgt0TbcvWjaKNgD3YRoiXgyY+Mim7fw0zQ at mail.gmail.com...

> On 26 August 2016 at 08:22, Frank Millman <frank at chagford.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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)
> >
>
> or.. you could just escape all & as & before escaping the > and <,
> and do the reverse on decode
>

Thanks, Joonas, but I have not quite grasped that.

Would you mind explaining how it would work?

Just to confirm that we are talking about the same thing -

This is not allowed - '<root><fld name="<new>"/></root>'  [A]

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as etree
>>> x = '<root><fld name="<new>"/></root>'
>>> y = etree.fromstring(x)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File 
"C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python35\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", 
line 1320, in XML
    parser.feed(text)
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, 
column 17

You have to escape it like this - '<root><fld name="<new>"/></root>' 
[B]

>>> x = '<root><fld name="<new>"/></root>'
>>> y = etree.fromstring(x)
>>> y.find('fld').get('name')
'<new>'
>>>

I want to convert the string from [B] to [A] for editing, and then back to 
[B] before saving.

Thanks

Frank