Escape extra quotes in malformed xml

Question

I've malformed xml file that contains extra quotes in a tag. I would like to remove them or replace by &quote. Malformed XML looks looks like:

<CLASS ATT2="PDX"R"088">

My expected result:

<CLASS ATT2="PDX R 088">
or
<CLASS ATT2="PDX&quot;R&quot;088">

I've tried to iterate through all lines and finding ATT first and last indexes but it's quite dirty and produces too much code.

Do anyone have simple solution for this?

Answer 1

This is not 100% foolproof, but might work with a little luck:

re.sub(r'(?<!=)"(?!>)', '&quot;', malformed_xml)

will only replace quotes that are neither preceded by = nor followed by > .

If there could be whitespace after = (or before > ), you can't use the re module anymore, but the regex module (PyPI) can work with this:

regex.sub(r'(?<!=\s*)"(?!\s*>)', '&quot;', malformed_xml)

Answer 2

Not the best solution maybe, but since you cannot parse it with (eg) xml.etree as it is invalid, you can try playing with something like the code below.

It will:

1. open the file
2. read it line by line
3. search for each line if there's a specific string (eg CLASS )
4. if CLASS is found, find all the occurrences of double quotes ( " )
5. check if more than two double-quotes are found and replace them with white space
6. update the lines

WARNING: BACKUP YOUR ORIGINAL FILE AS THIS WILL MODIFY IT!!!

import re

f = open(r'YOUR/FILE/HERE',"r+b")
lines = f.readlines()
for idx, row in enumerate(lines):
     if "CLASS" in row:
         quote_index = [x.start() for x in re.finditer('\"', row)]
         if len(quote_index) > 2:
             replace_quote = quote_index[1:-1]
             correct_row = list(row)
             for quotes in replace_quote:
                 correct_row[quotes] = " "
             new_row = "".join(correct_row)
             lines[idx] = new_row
f.seek(0)
f.truncate()
f.write(''.join(lines))
f.close()