How to escape XML special characters in python SAX parser?

Question

I'm trying to parse a large XML document and extract the <Text> tag content only.

XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<EchoroukonlineData>
<Echoroukonline>
 <ID>SHG_ARB_0000001</ID>
 <URL>http://www.echoroukonline.com/ara/articles/1.html</URL>
 <Headline>title</Headline>
 <Dateline>2008/02/22</Dateline>
 <Text>Text that should be parsed <!--><li><p><--></Text>
</Echoroukonline>
</EchoroukonlineData>

I'm using SAX parser to do this task as follows:

import xml.sax
import pandas as pd
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape
articles = []

class articlesHandler(xml.sax.ContentHandler):
    def startElement(self, name, attrs):
        self.current = name
      
    def characters(self, content):
        if self.current == "Text":
            self.Text = content
            
    def endElement(self, name):
        if self.current == "Text":
            text=self.Text
            articles.append(text)
            
handler = articlesHandler()
parser = xml.sax.make_parser()
parser.setContentHandler(handler)
parser.parse('dataset.xml')

The problem is the <Text> tag contains XML special charachters like <, >, I want to ignore those special characters. There is a function that escapes the special characters xml.sax.saxutils.escape(data). I used it in the characters() function as follows:

def characters(self, content):
        if self.current == "Text":
            self.Text = escape(content)

but it still doesn't work.
The error message: xml.sax._exceptions.SAXParseException: dataset.xml:8:1756: not well-formed (invalid token)

The XML in the question is well-formed, so the error message must be caused by a different XML document. — mzjn
– mzjn, Commented Dec 10, 2022 at 14:53

Anjani Gourisaria · Accepted Answer · 2022-12-08 19:56:41Z

0

def characters(self, content):
  if self.current == "Text":
  self.Text = re.sub('[<>,]', '', content)

This will remove any "<", ">" or "," characters from the XML text before storing it in the "self.Text" variable.

answered Dec 8, 2022 at 19:56

Anjani Gourisaria

1

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