CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonreportlab
Ashish K
Ashish K

Reputation: 21

Python Reportlab - Unable to print special characters

Python Reportlab:

I am facing problem while printing special characters in my pdf like "&"

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
from reportlab.rl_config import defaultPageSize
from reportlab.lib.units import inch

styles = getSampleStyleSheet()

def myFirstPage(canvas, doc):
  canvas.saveState()

def go():
  doc = SimpleDocTemplate("phello.pdf")
  Story = [Spacer(1,2*inch)]
  Story.append(Paragraph("Some text", styles["Normal"]))
  Story.append(Paragraph("Some other text with &", styles["Normal"]))
  doc.build(Story, onFirstPage=myFirstPage) 

go()

I Expected following output

 Some text
 Some other text with &

But the output I get is

 Some text
 Some other text with

Where did '&' get vanished.

I have searched some forums which say that I need to encode it as & but is there not easier way to handle this than encoding each special character?

I have added "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-" at the top of my script but that does not solve my problem

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4349

Answers (1)

manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact

Reputation: 3034

You should replace &, < and > with the &amp;, &lt; and &gt;. One easy way to do that is the Python escape function:

from cgi import escape
Story.append(Paragraph(escape("Some other text with &"), styles["Normal"]))

However, HTML tags need to have real < and > so a typical use would be more like:

text = "Some other text with &"
Story.append(Paragraph(escape("<b>" + text + "</b>"), styles["Normal"]))

Upvotes: 6

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