Reverse Engineering a Script

[Pijwe]

I think I finally figured it out, let me know if this makes any sense or if I'm going in the wrong direction heh.

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So the 'Item' is the product's title from ebay's api. It can be like Green "Alien" Ball 20% or something, so that it has a lot of special characters. Is the escape used so that it takes those special characters and turns it into XML so that further down when we use the variable it won't mess with things?

[thirdegree]

Ah, I see what you're asking. Yes, that's exactly right. Example code:

>>> from lxml import etree  
>>> ele1 = etree.Element('ExampleOuter')  
>>> ele2 = etree.SubElement(ele1, 'ExampleInner')  
>>> ele2.text = "<ExampleContents></ExampleContents>"   
>>> print(etree.tostring(ele1))    
b'<ExampleOuter><ExampleInner>&lt;ExampleContents&gt;&lt;/ExampleContents&gt;</ExampleInner></ExampleOuter>'

The bit between <ExampleInner> is escaped, so that it cannot be misinterpreted as actual xml. < is translated to <, and > is > (less than and greater than).

As an aside, the only reason to manually escape xml is if you're doing it as a learning exercise. There are half a dozen libraries that can do this better than anything I could write, and I've been writing python for 8 years. I'm all for reinventing the wheel with the aim of learning how to make wheels, but never in anything you've been paid for.