How to convert

Question

There's a xml file:

<body>
    <entry>
         I go to <hw>to</hw> to school.
    </entry>
</body>

For some reason, I changed <hw> to <hw> and </hw> to </hw> before parsing it with lxml parser.

<body>
    <entry>
         I go to &lt;hw&gt;to&lt;/hw&gt; to school.
    </entry>
</body>

But after modifying the parsed xml data, I want to get a <hw> element, not <hw>. How can I do that?

Kabie · Accepted Answer

First find a unescape function:

from xml.sax.saxutils import unescape

entry=body[0]

unescape and replace it with the original:

body.replace(entry, e.fromstring(unescape(e.tounicode(entry))))

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