Rails - Aug 2005 - XML Builder not escaping entities in attributes?

The XML Builder class seems to escape entities (turning & into &  
for example) inconsistently... it''s not escaping them in attributes,  
for example. See the following irb example:

irb(main):001:0> require ''rubygems''
irb(main):002:0> require_gem ''builder''
irb(main):003:0> xm = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => STDOUT)
irb(main):004:0> xm.person {|b| b.name("Ray");
b.phone("503-5959") }
<person><name>Ray</name><phone>503-5959</phone></person>=>
#<IO:0x2c8e0>
irb(main):005:0> xm.person {|b| b.name("Ray & co"); b.phone 
("503-5959") }
<person><name>Ray &amp;
co</name><phone>503-5959</phone></person>=>
#<IO:0x2c8e0>
irb(main):006:0> xm.person {|b| b.name(:name => "Ray & Co")
}
<person><name name="Ray & Co"/></person>=>
#<IO:0x2c8e0>

So it''s turning & into &amp; as it should in the first example,
but
not in the second, when it''s used as the attribute name="xxx"
rather
than <name>xxx</name>.

Is this the correct behavior (meaning I need to make a workaround  
myself) or is there some way to fix this to escape all occurrences of  
these entities? The problem is that it creates invalid XML and my  
parser''s not parsing it.

Thanks,
Raymond

On Aug 23, 2005, at 9:53 AM, Raymond Brigleb wrote:
> The XML Builder class seems to escape entities (turning & into  
> & for example) inconsistently... it''s not escaping them in
> attributes, for example.
Well never mind, I got around the problem by h() escaping the  
variables in question in my .rxml template. So it''s certainly not a  
big deal in a Rails app. Just a simple matter of thinking it through.

On Tuesday 23 August 2005 12:53 pm, Raymond Brigleb
wrote:
> So it''s turning & into & as it should in the first
example, but  
> not in the second, when it''s used as the attribute
name="xxx" rather  
> than <name>xxx</name>.
>
> Is this the correct behavior (meaning I need to make a workaround  
> myself) or is there some way to fix this to escape all occurrences of  
> these entities?
The behavior is intentional.  One can argue whether it is correct or not ;)

One of the early users of XmlBuilder had a use case where they were using 
entites in the attribute values.  That required ampersand to be passed 
"as-is" in the attribute value.  Builder had options for quoting or
not
quoting text elements, but there is no similar mechanism for attribute 
values, so the default is to not quote and allow the user to quote by hand if 
needed.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim-Fxty1mrVU9GlFc2d6oM/ew@public.gmane.org    
http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, 
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)