How to save unescaped & in nokogiri xml?

Question

How can I save & in the final xml file using nokogiri?

My code is like:

require \'rubygems\' 
require \'nokogiri\'

  file_name = \"         


        

Answer 1

You can't put an unescaped & in XML as you wish. Here is from the W3 spec for XML:

The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) MUST NOT appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they MUST be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively.

As for using CDATA in Nokogiri, here is info from Nokogiri's site, if you use Nokogiri::XML::Builder to build your XML.

UPDATE: Here is the code from my example mentioned in comments.

module Questions
  @source = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/questions.xml'
  def parse
    if File.exists?(@source)
      File.open(@source, 'r+') do |document|
        q = {}
        text = Nokogiri::XML::Document.parse(document)
        text.xpath('.//question').each do |c|
          parent = c.attribute_nodes[2].to_s
          q[:type] = c.attribute_nodes[1].to_s.to_sym   # => question type
          q[:q_id] = c.attribute_nodes[0].to_s   # => question type
          q[:question] = c.xpath('.//q').first.content   # => question
          q[:answers] = []
          c.xpath('.//a').each { |ans|
            p = ans.attribute_nodes.first.value   # => point value
            a = ans.content   # => answer
            q[:answers] << [a, p]
          }
          if parent == "NA"
            Question.create!(q)
          else
            Question.first(conditions: {q_id: parent}).children << Question.create!(q)
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end

  def write
    builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
      xml.root {
        Question.each do |t|
          xml.question(id: t.id, type: t.type, parent: t.parent) {
            xml.q_ t.q
            t.answers.each { |c|
              xml.a(point: c.p) { xml.text c.a }
            }
          }
        end
      }
    end
    document = builder.to_xml
    File.open(@source, 'w+') do |f|
      f.puts document
    end
  end   # end write

  module_function :parse
  module_function :write
end

--- And an example of what I was working with. ---

  <question id="q0000" type="root" parent="NA">
    <q>How do you feel about sports?</q>
    <a point="0">I don't have any interest in sports.</a>
    <a point="q0001">I like to play sports.</a>
    <a point="q0002">I follow college or professional sports.</a>
  </question>