ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token) using cElementTree

Question

I receive xml strings from an external source that can contains unsanitized user contributed content.

The following xml string gave a ParseError in cElementTre

Answer 1

A solution for gottcha for me, using Python's ElementTree... this has the invalid token error:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = u"""
Did you verify those street names?"""

xmltest = ET.fromstring(xml.encode("utf-8"))

However, it works with the addition of a hyphen in the encoding type:

Most odd. Someone found this footnote in the python docs:

The encoding string included in XML output should conform to the appropriate standards. For example, “UTF-8” is valid, but “UTF8” is not.