How to escape characters in Pango markup?

Question

My program has a gtk.TreeView which displays a gtk.ListStore. The gtk.ListStore contains strings like this:

"<span size='medium'><b>"+site_title+"</b></span>"+"\n"+URL

Where URL is (obviously) a URL string. Sometimes there are characters in URL that cause pango to fail to parse the markup.

Is there a way to escape URL as a whole so that pango will just ignore it so it will be displayed literally? If not, how should I "escape" special characters in URLs?

Answer 1

You need to escape the values. I'm not sure what exact format Pango requires, but it looks like HTML and the cgi.escape function may be all you need.

import cgi
print "<span size='medium'><b>%s</b></span>\n%s" %
      (cgi.escape(site_title), cgi.escape(URL))

Answer 2

glib.markup_escape_text may be a more canonical approach when using GTK.