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pythonxmlbeautifulsoup

Formatting for xml tag into a soap request using BeautifulSoup with Python

I'm trying to add a tag into an xml file. When the tag is stored as a variable I noticed that the < /> characters were decoded to &lt; &gt; when I tried to append() it to the xml.

import html
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

no_email = '<errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/>'
bs = BeautifulSoup(xml, "xml")
header = bs.find("S:Header")
header.append(no_email)
print(header.prettify())

which results in this output

<S:Header>
 <Some Header info/>
 &lt;errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/&gt;
</S:Header>

I used html.unescape() on the below variable and it looks fine when printed out

no_email = html.unescape('&lt;errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/&gt;')
print(no_email)

<errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/>

but when I pass no_email into a specific tag using beautifulsoup it still looks exactly as it is written in the string and I'm not sure why.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
no_email = html.unescape('&lt;errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/&gt;')
bs = BeautifulSoup(xml, "xml")
header = bs.find("S:Header")
header.append(no_email)
print(header.prettify())

output:

<S:Header>
 <Some Header Info/>
 &lt;errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/&gt;
</S:Header>

How can I use this correctly so that I get this result:

    <S:Header>
     <Some Header Info/>
     <errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/>
    </S:Header>
Solution

  • Use a new_tag() element instead of a string:

    import bs4
from io import StringIO

xml = """<root xmlns:S ="something">
<S:Header>
 <Some_Header_info/>
</S:Header></root>"""
f = StringIO(xml)

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(f.read(), "xml")
no_email = soup.new_tag("errorEmailNotification", enabled="false")
header = soup.find("S:Header")
header.append(no_email)
print(soup.prettify())

    Output:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root xmlns:S="something">
 <S:Header>
  <Some_Header_info/>
  <errorEmailNotification enabled="false"/>
 </S:Header>
</root>