How to properly escape single and double quotes

Question

I have a lxml etree HTMLParser object that I\'m trying to build xpaths with to assert xpaths, attributes of the xpath and text of that tag. I ran into a problem when the te

Answer 1

The solution is applicable If u r using python lxml. Its better to leave the escaping for lxml. We can do this by using lxmlvariables. Suppose We have xpath as below:

//tagname[text='some_text']`

If some_text has both single and double quotes, then it causes "Invalid Predicate error". Neither escaping work for me nor triple quotes. Because xml won't accept triple quotes.

Solution worked for me is lxml variables.

We convert the xpath as below:

//tagname[text = $var]

Then execute

find = etree.XPath(xpath)

Then evaluate these variable to its value

elements = find(root, {'var': text})