Escaping strings for use in XML

Question

I'm using Python's xml.dom.minidom to create an XML document. (Logical structure -> XML string, not the other way around.)

How do I make it escape the strings I provide so they won't be able to mess up the XML?

Answer 1

Something like this?

>>> from xml.sax.saxutils import escape >>> escape("< & >")    '&lt; &amp; &gt;' 

Answer 2

xml.sax.saxutils does not escape quotation characters (")

So here is another one:

def escape( str ):     str = str.replace("&", "&amp;")     str = str.replace("<", "&lt;")     str = str.replace(">", "&gt;")     str = str.replace("\"", "&quot;")     return str 

if you look it up then xml.sax.saxutils only does string replace