I have an XML file that needs to have a "TAB" character as a value to a key. Based on this link Represent space and tab in XML tag I encoded it as 	 rather than use "\t" as it was interpreting it as string containing two characters '\' and 't'.
I did not use the CDATA section as that would still consider a TAB as a string containing two characters '\' and 't'
The sample XML file of my use case looks like this
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <keys> <key> <name>key1</name> <value>value1</value> </key> <key> <name>key2</name> <value>	</value> </key> <key> <name>key3</name> <value>2048</value> </key> </keys> This is the code that I have right now that is not able to handle this TAB character
... dom_obj = minidom.parse(self.path_to_xml) ... for each_key_child in key_child: if each_key_child.nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE: if each_key_child.nodeName == 'name': node_name = str(each_key_child.childNodes[0].data.strip()) elif each_key_child.nodeName == 'value': node_value = str(each_key_child.childNodes[0].data.strip()) else: pass else: pass The output that I get after the script is executed is
'key1': 'value1', 'key2': '', 'key3': '2048', But when I execute it on the Python interactive interpreter
mobj = minidom.parse(path_to_xml_file) mobj.getElementsByTagName("value")[1].childNodes[0] I get the following output
<DOM Text node "u'\t'"> But I am not able to assign the output to a variable. This step is not working
node = mobj.getElementsByTagName("value")[1].childNodes[0].data But another strange thing is that when I just say node at the interpreter it is printing '\t' !!
node u'\t' To see if this was a genuine case where the TAB character was getting stored in the variable but not getting displayed I used it as a separator to concatenate two strings.
This works fine at the interpreter but not in the script the output of which I saw on vim through the :set list option
Can anyone tell me what is wrong with the approach taken by me. Help appreciated!
