Entity references and lxml

Question

Here's the code I have:

from cStringIO import StringIO
from lxml import etree

xml = StringIO('''<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE root [
<!ENTITY test "This is a test">
]>
<root>
  <sub>&test;</sub>
</root>''')

d1 = etree.parse(xml)
print '%r' % d1.find('/sub').text

parser = etree.XMLParser(resolve_entities=False)
d2 = etree.parse(xml, parser=parser)
print '%r' % d2.find('/sub').text

Here's the output:

'This is a test'
None

How do I get lxml to give me '&test;', i.e., the raw entity reference?

Answer 1

The "unresolved" Entity is left as child node of the element node sub

>>> print d2.find('/sub')[0]
&test;
>>> d2.find('/sub').getchildren()
[&test;]