Encoded characters are decoded in output?

[bandophahita]

Is there a way of preventing the Formatter.format_string() from decoding encoded characters in the original xml?

Example:

xmlstr = """<ogc:Filter someattrib="example with encoded chars &lt; &gt; that should stay encoded"><ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo><ogc:PropertyName>stationid_alpha</ogc:PropertyName><ogc:Literal>val</ogc:Literal></ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo></ogc:Filter>"""
formatter = xmlformatter.Formatter()
outstr = formatter.format_string(xmlstr)
print outstr

Output:

<ogc:Filter someattrib="example with encoded chars < > that should stay encoded">
  <ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo>
    <ogc:PropertyName>stationid_alpha</ogc:PropertyName>
    <ogc:Literal>val</ogc:Literal>
  </ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo>
</ogc:Filter>

[bandophahita]

I think I may have solved the problem locally, though my xml knowledge is not great so I'm not sure I completely understand the ramifications of the 'fix'.

Using xml.sax.saxutil.escape I was able to escape the 'decoded portions of both the attributes of a StartElement and the text of a CharacterData.

replace lines 471, 472

 			if not self.cdata_section:
 				str = re.sub(r'&', '&', str) #replace
 				str = re.sub(r'<', '&lt;', str) #replace

with

 				str = escape(str)

replace line 631

			for attr in sorted(self.arg[1].keys()):
				str += self.attribute(attr, self.arg[1][attr]) #replace

with

				str += self.attribute(attr, escape(self.arg[1][attr]))

The above works, but I was afraid this might cause problems in the future (hence my lack of xml knowledge), so I added an argument to Formatter() which passes down to the two Token sub classes and only escapes the strings if that argument is set to True.

[bandophahita]

Here are my local changes which provide the option of enabling escape(). Apologies for not doing a pull request, I'm not setup for git on this computer at the moment. xmlformatter.zip

[pamoller]

Tryed your patch, but unfortunately it breaks the test suite (Test 24 and 31).

$ git clone [email protected]:pamoller/xmlformatter.git
$ cd xmlformatter
$ sudo make install
$ make regress
......F.
======================================================================
FAIL: test_pretty (__main__.TestXmlFormatter)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_xmlformatter.py", line 34, in test_pretty
    self.assertEqual(self.formatter.format_file("t24.xml"), self.readfile("t24.xml"))
AssertionError: '<root>&amp;&lt;&gt;</root>' != '<root>&amp;&lt;></root>'

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 8 tests in 0.092s

FAILED (failures=1)
Makefile:15: die Regel für Ziel „regress“ scheiterte
make: *** [regress] Fehler 1

I've add your test to GitHub (t32.xml). I don't think additional XML Packages will help.

[pamoller]

It is an expat specific behaviour, and libxml2 may handle it different. So libxml2 is the best choice for you. I'm looking forward to a workaround. A additional map mechanism may be not serious.

[hartwork]

Hi!

This place in code…

https://github.com/pamoller/xmlformatter/blob/ebbc3b307c93ba44629686703ba6908fe2e0c558/xmlformatter.py#L469-L471

…seems indeed missing escaping of < (opening angle bracket) to < and " (double quote) to " to produce well-formed XML. (That's a little less than what xml.sax.saxutil.escape is doing.)

[hartwork]

PS: So there are two separate issues coming together here:

• Expat is passing < as < to xmlformatter (and there is no current way to stop Expat from doing that).
• xmlformatter needs to do more re-escaping when writing XML and does not yet do that (but that it's easy to fix).

[hartwork]

In [1]: def escape_quot_attribute_value(value: str) -> str:
   ...:     return value.replace('&', '&amp;').replace('<', '&lt;')  # order matters!
   ...: 

In [2]: escape_quot_attribute_value('Hello & good bye; 2 < 3 == True')
Out[2]: 'Hello &amp; good bye; 2 &lt; 3 == True'

[pamoller]

@hartwork this simple replacement, does not work, because this snippet

<!DOCTYPE example [
  <!ENTITY dangle ">">
]>
<example att="The dangle symbol is &dangle;"/>

is resolved to

<!DOCTYPE example [
  <!ENTITY dangle ">">
]>
<example att="The dangle symbol is >"></example>

So < is not unambiguous

[hartwork]

@pamoller let's not mix < and > please, they are a very different story. The output above is alright with regard to escaping and well-formed XML, and this case shows that the fix from 57b50f5390eb02f8963c44a312f1082e0c180a2b is indeed working:

Input

<!DOCTYPE example [
  <!ENTITY dangle "&#38;#60;">
]>
<example att="The dangle symbol is &dangle;"/>

Output

<!DOCTYPE example [
  <!ENTITY dangle "&#60;"><!-- BROKEN! -->
]>
<example att="The dangle symbol is &lt;"></example><!-- GOOD! -->

Unfortunately, line 2 shows that there are more places missing escaping…

[pamoller]

Please refer to https://github.com/pamoller/xmlformatter/discussions/17