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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T03:25:37+00:00

I need to escape special characters in an invalid XML file which is about

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I need to escape special characters in an invalid XML file which is about 5000 lines long. Here’s an example of the XML that I have to deal with:

<root>
 <element>
  <name>name & surname</name>
  <mail>name@name.org</mail>
 </element>
</root>

Here the problem is the character “&” in the name. How would you escape special characters like this with a Python library? I didn’t find a way to do it with BeautifulSoup.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you don’t care about invalid characters in the xml you could use XML parser’s recover option (see Parsing broken XML with lxml.etree.iterparse):

    from lxml import etree

parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True) # recover from bad characters.
root = etree.fromstring(broken_xml, parser=parser)
print etree.tostring(root)

    Output

    <root>
<element>
<name>name  surname</name>
<mail>name@name.org</mail>
</element>
</root>
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