It was recently noticed[1] that the xmldoublequote parameter to
format=xml has been broken since r55641,[2] merged in August 2009 and
released with MediaWiki 1.16. Since it has been broken for over 3.5
years, it was decided to just remove the parameter.[3]
Background: The xmldoublequote parameter was added in response to bug
11401,[4] as a workaround for the fact that XPath 1.0 did not specify
any mechanism for escaping quotes in string literals. It caused all
attribute values and text content to be double-encoded, e.g. a double
quote would be represented as ", and an ampersand would be
represented as &.
Workaround: XPath 2.0, released in 2007, does include a quoting
mechanism. Clients using XPath 1.0 may use string concatenation as a
workaround.[5]
[1]:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46626
[2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/55641
[3]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/58261/
[4]:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11401
[5]: e.g.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6937525/escaping-xpath-literal-with-pyth…
--
Brad Jorsch
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation