Escaping strings for use in XML

Something like this?

>>> from xml.sax.saxutils import escape
>>> escape("< & >")   
'&lt; &amp; &gt;'

Do you mean you do something like this:

from xml.dom.minidom import Text, Element

t = Text()
e = Element('p')

t.data = '<bar><a/><baz spam="eggs"> & blabla &entity;</>'
e.appendChild(t)

Then you will get nicely escaped XML string:

>>> e.toxml()
'<p>&lt;bar&gt;&lt;a/&gt;&lt;baz spam=&quot;eggs&quot;&gt; &amp; blabla &amp;entity;&lt;/&gt;</p>'

xml.sax.saxutils does not escape quotation characters (")

So here is another one:

def escape( str_xml: str ):
    str_xml = str_xml.replace("&", "&")
    str_xml = str_xml.replace("<", "&lt;")
    str_xml = str_xml.replace(">", "&gt;")
    str_xml = str_xml.replace("\"", "&quot;")
    str_xml = str_xml.replace("'", "&apos;")
    return str_xml

if you look it up then xml.sax.saxutils only does string replace

xml.sax.saxutils.escape only escapes &, <, and > by default, but it does provide an entities parameter to additionally escape other strings:

from xml.sax.saxutils import escape

def xmlescape(data):
    return escape(data, entities={
        "'": "'",
        "\"": """
    })

xml.sax.saxutils.escape uses str.replace() internally, so you can also skip the import and write your own function, as shown in MichealMoser's answer.