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

The only thing that worked for me is I had to add mode and encoding while opening the file like below:

with open(filenames[0], mode='r',encoding='utf-8') as f:
     readFile()

Otherwise it was failing every time with invalid token error if I simply do this:

 f = open(filenames[0], 'r')
 readFile()