How to handle "&" ?

[Heck Lennon]

Hello,

I'm in a conundrum working with GPX (XML) files.

I use the following to prevent BS from turning < and > into &lt; and &gt; respectively:

==================

with open(OUTPUTFILE, "w") as file:
    file.write(soup.prettify(formatter=None))
==================

But as a result, & in URLs are kept as-is… which the Android map application doesn't like, and neither does Tidy:

   <description>
    https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=48.26341&mlon=2.69425#map=16/48.2661/2.6953&layers=C
   </description>

Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&mlon"
Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity "&layers"

OTOH, if call prettify() with no parameters, the & will be turned into &amp; … which the application likes, but Style is no longer valid:

==================

with open(OUTPUTFILE, "w") as file:
    file.write(soup.prettify())

==================

&lt;Style&gt;&lt;LineStyle&gt;&lt;color&gt;FF0000FF&lt;/color&gt;&lt;width&gt;6&lt;/width&gt;&lt;/LineStyle&gt;&lt;/Style&gt;

What should I do?

Thank you.

[leonardr]

Can you share the whole GPX document? It looks like lxml is parsing your <Style> tag as a string, not as a tag. I would guess that is the root of the problem, and if that can be fixed then the default behavior will do what you need.

Leonard

[Heck Lennon]

Sorry, I forgo to show how I use the string: 

LS = "<Style><LineStyle><color>FF0000FF</color><width>6</width></LineStyle></Style>"
…
for ls in soup.find_all("LineString"):
    ls.insert_before(LS)

I guess inserting more than one tag at one go requires some exra code, so BS doesn't turn into a plain string.

[leonardr]

Yes, that's what's going on -- it's being inserted as a string, and then the angle brackets in the string are being encoded on the way out.

I recommend building that Style tag inside the for loop. The simplest way to do that is to parse that string into a second BeautifulSoup object. I say do this inside the for loop, because if you reuse a Style tag, it'll just migrate throughout the document and end up in the last place you put it.

Leonard

[Heck Lennon]

Bingo:

=============

if soup.find("LineString"): #track(s)
    print("Track(s) found")

    for ls in soup.find_all("LineString"):

        LS_soup = BeautifulSoup("<Style><LineStyle><color>FF0000FF</color><width>6</width></LineStyle></Style>", builder=builder,features='xml')
        ls.insert_before(LS_soup)

=============

Thank you.