Don't encode Element text object using Python ElementTree

Question

I'm trying to use HTML data inside an the text node of an element, but it gets encoded as if it were meant to not be HTML data.

Here is an MWE:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

data = '<a href="https://example.com">Example data gained from elsewhere.</a>'

p = ET.Element('p')
p.text = data
p = ET.tostring(p, encoding='utf-8', method='html').decode('utf8')
print(p)

The output is...

<p>&lt;a href="https://example.com"&gt;Example data gained from elsewhere.&lt;/a&gt;</p>

What I intended is...

<p><a href="https://example.com">Example data gained from elsewhere.</a></p>

Kris · Accepted Answer · 2022-03-04 13:40:00Z

2

What you are doing is wrong. You are assigning p.text = data, which basically considers the node to be text content. Its quite obvious the text is escaped. You have to add it as a child. like below:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

data = '<a href="https://example.com">Example data gained from elsewhere.</a>'

d = ET.fromstring(data)
p = ET.Element('p')

p.append(d)
p = ET.tostring(p, encoding='utf-8', method='html').decode('utf8')
print(p)

Giving output

<p><a href="https://example.com">Example data gained from elsewhere.</a></p>

answered Mar 4, 2022 at 13:40

Kris

8,8984 gold badges45 silver badges71 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

user3515670 · Accepted Answer · 2022-03-04 13:39:19Z

1

You can parse the HTML string into an ElementTree object and append it to the DOM:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

data = '<a href="https://example.com">Example data gained from elsewhere.</a>'

p = ET.Element('p')
p.append(ET.fromstring(data))
p = ET.tostring(p, encoding='utf-8', method='html').decode('utf8')
print(p)

answered Mar 4, 2022 at 13:39

user3515670

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Don't encode Element text object using Python ElementTree

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related