error with parse function in lxml

Question

i have installed lxml2.2.2 on windows platform(i m using python version 2.6.5).i tried this simple command:

from lxml.html import parse 
p= parse(‘http://www.google.com’).getroot()

but i am getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in p=parse(‘http://www.google.com’).getroot()
File “C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\lxml-2.2.2-py2.6-win32.egg\lxml\html_init_.py”, line 661, in parse return etree.parse(filenameorurl, parser, baseurl=baseurl, **kw) 
File “lxml.etree.pyx”, line 2698, in lxml.etree.parse (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:49590) 
File “parser.pxi”, line 1491, in lxml.etree.parseDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71205) File “parser.pxi”, line 1520, in lxml.etree.parseDocumentFromURL (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:71488) 
File “parser.pxi”, line 1420, in lxml.etree.parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:70583)
File “parser.pxi”, line 975, in lxml.etree.BaseParser.parseDocFrom
File (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:67736)
File “parser.pxi”, line 539, in lxml.etree.ParserContext.handleParseResultDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:63820) 
File “parser.pxi”, line 625, in lxml.etree.handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:64741)
File “parser.pxi”, line 563, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:64056)
IOError: Error reading file ‘http://www.google.com’: failed to load external entity “http://www.google.com”

i am clueless as to what to do next as i am a newbie to python. please guide me to solve this error. thanks in advance!! :)

Answer 1

lxml.html.parse does not fetch URLs.

Here's how to do it with urllib2:

>>> from urllib2 import urlopen
>>> from lxml.html import parse
>>> page = urlopen('http://www.google.com')
>>> p = parse(page)
>>> p.getroot()
<Element html at 1304050>

---

Update
Steven is right. lxml.etree.parse should accept and load URLs. I missed that. I've tried deleting this answer, but I'm not allowed.

I retract my statement about it not fetching URLs.

Answer 2

According to the api docs it should work: http://lxml.de/api/lxml.html-module.html#parse

This seems to be a bug in lxml 2.2.2. I just tested on windows with python 2.6 and 2.7 and it does work with 2.3.0.

So: upgrade your lxml and you'll be fine.

I don't know exactly in which versions of lxml the problem occurs, but I believe the problem was not so much with lxml itself, but with the version of libxml2 used to build the windows binary. (certain versions of libxml2 had a problem with http on windows)

Answer 3

Since line breaks are not allowed in comments, here's my implementation of MattH's answer:

from urllib2 import urlopen
from lxml.html import parse

site_url = ('http://www.google.com')

try:
    page = parse(site_url).getroot()
except IOError:
    page = parse(urlopen(site_url)).getroot()