Is there a way to get a verbatim string out of an ElementTree element?

Question

I am trying to check the MD5 hash of the text information in an XML element including all its children. This is required to interact with hipay services.

def CheckMD5(tree):
    m = hashlib.md5()
    body = tree.find('result')
    m.update(ET.tostring(ET.ElementTree(body).getroot(), method="html"))

    return tree.find('md5content').text == m.hexdigest()

Full code: https://github.com/fabiosantoscode/python-hipay/blob/master/hipay.py#L566

My problem is that calling ElementTree.tostring with method="xml" makes ElementTree collapse closing tags of empty elements, but using method="html" I lose capitalization. Example:

>>> ET.tostring(ET.fromstring('<rt><a></a><CapName>asd</CapName></rt>'), method='xml')
'<rt><a /><CapName>asd</CapName></rt>'
>>> ET.tostring(ET.fromstring('<rt><a></a><CapName>asd</CapName></rt>'), method='html')
'<rt><a></a><CapName>asd</capname></rt>'
>>>

Note:

I don't need to modify this XML document at all, I just need to extract the string data of the <result> element. If there are other libraries which allow me to do this, please indicate.

unutbu · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-19 16:22:19Z

1

LH.tostring does not collapse closing tags:

In [34]: import lxml.etree as ET

In [35]: import lxml.html as LH

In [36]: LH.tostring(ET.fromstring('<rt><a></a><CapName>asd</CapName></rt>'))
Out[36]: '<rt><a></a><CapName>asd</CapName></rt>'

answered Mar 19, 2013 at 16:22

unutbu

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