newlines and sax.saxutils.quoteattr

[Edward K. Ream]

Hello all,

I recently ran across a situation in which sax.saxutils.quoteattr did not
work as I expected. I am writing Leo outlines as opml files
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
which forces me to write python code in xml attributes rather than xml
elements (as is done in .leo files).

The problem is that the sax parser I am using ignores newlines in
attributes. After reading the thread at:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pyt...ch/332307.html

I was able to work around the problem by converting newlines to ' \n'.
This makes the opml file as readable as possible (since the attributes
contains newlines in addition to the character reference In addition,
the sax parser seems happy.

My questions:

- Does anyone know whether this is guaranteed to be a general solution? That
is, are sax parsers *obliged* to ignore newlines in attributes?

- If sax parsers are indeed obliged to ignore newlines in attributes, would
it be a good idea to (optionally?) have sax.saxutils.quoteattr perform the
substitution of newlines to ' \n' ?

Thanks.

Edward
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Edward K. Ream email: ed*******@charter.net
Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
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[Fredrik Lundh]

Edward K. Ream wrote:

- Does anyone know whether this is guaranteed to be a general solution? That
is, are sax parsers *obliged* to ignore newlines in attributes?

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#AVNormalize

- If sax parsers are indeed obliged to ignore newlines in attributes, would
it be a good idea to (optionally?) have sax.saxutils.quoteattr perform the
substitution of newlines to ' \n' ?

perhaps. a really good idea would be store free-format text in
elements, not attributes, but I guess it's too late to fix OPML.

</F>

[Edward K. Ream]

Thanks, Fredrik, for the reference to the attribute normalization algorithm.

I guess it's too late to fix OPML.

It's too late for OPML 1. I'll check with Dave Winer about OPML 2.

Edward
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Edward K. Ream email: ed*******@charter.net
Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
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