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;
#if (lg_quality = 3)
#declare lg_quality = 4;
#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 
 .

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;&
#if (lg_quality = 3)&
#declare lg_quality = 4;&
#end"
dep21.text = "#declare lg_studs = LDXStuds;&
"
ET.tostring(dep11).replace('&&', '&')
ET.tostring(dep21).replace('&&', '&')

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

Again I am stuck.

Answer 1

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

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

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.