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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T14:58:21+00:00

I am trying to find an XML element within an SVG (font) file based

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I am trying to find an XML element within an SVG (font) file based on the content of an attribute, like so: 

font = et.ElementTree(file='fontfile.svg')
glyph = font.find('//n:glyph[@unicode="%s"]' % symbol, namespaces={'n': SVGNS})

Glyph examples — what I’m trying to match to — are:

<glyph unicode="&#xa9;" horiz-adv-x="1792" d="M834 ... -40t-121 -18z " />
<glyph unicode="C" horiz-adv-x="1509" d="M1766 338q-49 ... 83.5v-215z" />

Problem is that when, for example, 

symbol = "C"

it works fine (there is a match), but when 

symbol = "&#xa9;"

it doesn’t. I suspect that there is a unicode interpretation in one direction of the matching, but not the other. What is the correct way to resolve this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Building on unutbu’s answer, when you do ET.fromstring, it translates the HTML entities into unicode objects as attributes. 

    >>> import lxml.etree as ET
>>> 
>>> content = '''\
... <root xmlns="SVGNS">
... <glyph unicode="&#xa9;" horiz-adv-x="1792" d="M834 ... -40t-121 -18z " />
... <glyph unicode="C" horiz-adv-x="1509" d="M1766 338q-49 ... 83.5v-215z" />
... </root>'''
>>> font = ET.fromstring(content)
>>> font
<Element {SVGNS}root at 0x7fd7ab978410>
>>> font.xpath('//n:glyph', namespaces={'n':'SVGNS'})[0].attrib
{'horiz-adv-x': '1792', 'unicode': u'\xa9', 'd': 'M834 ... -40t-121 -18z '}

    So, the answer at the end of the day is that the HTML entity &#xa9; no longer exists as such in font, to search for it it needs to be converted into unicode. Some ways to do that are explained here.

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