XML line break character entity and Python encoding

Question

I have the following line of code in a python script:

dep11 = ET.SubElement(dep1, "POVCode").text = "#declare lg_quality = LDXQual;&#x0A;#if (lg_quality = 3)&#x0A;#declare lg_quality = 4;&#x0A;#end"

My question is in regards to the 
 character. I want to see this character entity in the XML output, but the first ampersand keeps getting replaced with the & character entity, which creates the nonsense character entity &#x0A;.

I am encoding the file as utf-8.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

...

with open("LGEO.xml", "wb") as f:
    tree.write(f, "utf-8")

And I end up with:

<POVCode>#declare lg_quality = LDXQual;&amp;#x0A;#if (lg_quality = 3)&amp;#x0A;#declare lg_quality = 4;&amp;#x0A;#end</POVCode>

Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[edit]

I am trying to implement the solution found here that @mzjn pointed out.

How to output XML entity references

I have six lines of code:

dep11 = ET.SubElement(dep1, "POVCode")
dep21 = ET.SubElement(dep2, "POVCode")
dep11.text = "#declare lg_quality = LDXQual;&&#x0A;#if (lg_quality = 3)&&#x0A;#declare lg_quality = 4;&&#x0A;#end"
dep21.text = "#declare lg_studs = LDXStuds;&&#x0A;"
ET.tostring(dep11).replace('&amp;&amp;', '&')
ET.tostring(dep21).replace('&amp;&amp;', '&')

I get no error, but the result is not any different than before when I write the tree.

Again I am stuck.

Have you tried adding encoding declaration to the python file? (`# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-` at the beginning of the file) — gunesevitan, Jul 04 '19 at 18:44
Very similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/7986272/407651 — mzjn, Jul 06 '19 at 05:39
The issue is exactly the same. There's only the one suggestion of a solution however. — posfan12, Jul 06 '19 at 05:45
You should add the text as a [CDATA section](https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-cdata-sect). This is much easier in lxml, but possible in ElementTree. See this answer for an example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55150569/317052 — Daniel Haley, Jul 08 '19 at 18:55

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 09 '19 at 02:41

What I eventually did was use the standard Python write function instead of using ElementTree's own write function.

text = ET.tostring(root).replace("&amp;&amp;", "&")

with open("LGEO.xml", "wb") as f:
    f.write(text.encode("utf-8"))

The above is the last step in the Python code. I don't know if there are disadvantages to converting the root object to a string like this. It could be slower but it works for me.

XML line break character entity and Python encoding

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