.. module:: slixmpp.xmlstream.tostring .. _tostring: XML Serialization ================= Since the XML layer of Slixmpp 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 slixmpp.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:`~slixmpp.stanza.message.Message` instance and dump it to the terminal, the ``jabber:client`` namespace will appear. .. autofunction:: slixmpp.xmlstream.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