Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

quoted string value is quoted again

See original GitHub issue

Hi! I just found this solution for translation of xml to dict and is amazing!! Thanks a lot! I tiny problem that i encountered is that a value like: <lp>"/"</lp> is translated to "lp": "\"/\""

is there any way to not quote the string and just use it as is? Thanks a lot!

Issue Analytics

State:
Created a year ago
Comments:9

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

SamStephenscommented, Oct 4, 2022

@adriansev the key thing here is that quotes inside tags have no special meaning as far as the XML specification goes. They are just characters, and as far as the XML specification says, they are significant and should be treated as data, not as a container for a string. As far as the XML spec goes, you would represent the dict { "key": "my_string" } as <key>my_string</key>, not <key>"my_string"</key>. The fact you have strings inside your XML that include quotes that are not actually part of the data within that tag is not something an XML parser should handle, as that’s not part of the XML specification; that’s a behavior of your application that is separate to the XML specification.

As far as your request to add a special case detect_quotes flag into this library, the problem is that this then sets a precedent to extend the parser with features outside of the XML specification. What if another user then comes along and says that the data in their XML tags has single quote characters that need to be ignored? Or that the data inside the XML tags is URL encoded, and there should be an url_decode flag to ask the parser to decode URL encoded strings? Suddenly we end up with an explosion of features to deal with idiosyncrasies that are not actually part of the XML specification, that are dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the data stored within the XML.

My suggestion to you is to treat this as a feature of the data you are handling, rather than something that should be a feature of an XML parser. Build a method or module to take the output of XML to dict mapping, and remove the quotes from the string values within the dictionary.

0reactions

adriansevcommented, Oct 5, 2022

@SamStephens ok, got it, thanks a lot for your time and info!