Re: Alternatives to XML?

[Frank Millman]

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

As you have to keep the "<", why bother?

If you mean why don't I convert the '<' to '&lt;', 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>&lt;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('&lt;', '<').replace('&gt;', '>')
return '"'.join(lines)

Frank


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