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diff --git a/docs/api/xmlstream/tostring.rst b/docs/api/xmlstream/tostring.rst new file mode 100644 index 00000000..82a8c2a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/api/xmlstream/tostring.rst @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +.. module:: sleekxmpp.xmlstream.tostring + +.. _tostring: + +XML Serialization +================= + +Since the XML layer of SleekXMPP is based on :mod:`~xml.etree.ElementTree`, +why not just use the built-in :func:`~xml.etree.ElementTree.tostring` +method? The answer is that using that method produces ugly results when +using namespaces. The :func:`tostring()` method used here intelligently +hides namespaces when able and does not introduce excessive namespace +prefixes:: + + >>> from sleekxmpp.xmlstream.tostring import tostring + >>> from xml.etree import cElementTree as ET + >>> xml = ET.fromstring('<foo xmlns="bar"><baz /></foo>') + >>> ET.tostring(xml) + '<ns0:foo xmlns:ns0="bar"><ns0:baz /></foo>' + >>> tostring(xml) + '<foo xmlns="bar"><baz /></foo>' + +As a side effect of this namespace hiding, using :func:`tostring()` may +produce unexpected results depending on how the :func:`tostring()` method +is invoked. For example, when sending XML on the wire, the main XMPP +stanzas with their namespace of ``jabber:client`` will not include the +namespace because that is already declared by the stream header. But, if +you create a :class:`~sleekxmpp.stanza.message.Message` instance and dump +it to the terminal, the ``jabber:client`` namespace will appear. + +.. autofunction:: tostring + +Escaping Special Characters +--------------------------- + +In order to prevent errors when sending arbitrary text as the textual +content of an XML element, certain characters must be escaped. These +are: ``&``, ``<``, ``>``, ``"``, and ``'``. The default escaping +mechanism is to replace those characters with their equivalent escape +entities: ``&``, ``<``, ``>``, ``'``, and ``"``. + +In the future, the use of CDATA sections may be allowed to reduce the +size of escaped text or for when other XMPP processing agents do not +undertand these entities. + +.. autofunction:: xml_escape |