Python XML ElementTree not reading node with &-CodePudding

I have an XML, with one of the nodes having '&' within a string:

<uid>JAMES&001</uid>

now, when I try to read the whole xml using the following code:

tree = et.parse(fileName)
root = tree.getroot()
ids = root.findall("uid")

I get the error on the link of the above-mentioned node:

xml.etree.ElelmentTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line17, column 21

The code works fine on other instances where there is no '&'. I guess it's breaking the string.

Can it be fixed with encoding? How? I searched through other questions but couldn't find an answer.

TIA

CodePudding user response：

You need to sanitize your xml first since it isn't well formed.

You need to replace the offending & - something like .replace("&", "&")

One way to use it:

with open(fileName, 'r ') as f:
        read_data = f.read()
        doc = ET.fromstring(read_data.replace("&", "&amp;"))
        print(doc.find('./uid').text)

Output, given your sample, should be

JAMES&001