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

It seems to complain about \x08 you will need to escape that.

Edit:

Or you can have the parser ignore the errors using recover

from lxml import etree
parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True)
etree.fromstring(xmlstring, parser=parser)

Answer 2

This is most probably an encoding error. For example I had an xml file encoded in UTF-8-BOM (checked from the Notepad++ Encoding menu) and got similar error message.

The workaround (Python 3.6)

import io
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

with io.open(file, 'r', encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
    contents = f.read()
    tree = ET.fromstring(contents)

Check the encoding of your xml file. If it is using different encoding, change the 'utf-8-sig' accordingly.

Answer 3

None of the above fixes worked for me. The only thing that worked was to use BeautifulSoup instead of ElementTree as follows:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

with open("data/myfile.xml") as fp:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'xml')

Then you can search the tree as:

soup.find_all('mytag')

Answer 4

I tried the other solutions in the answers here but had no luck. Since I only needed to extract the value from a single xml node I gave in and wrote my function to do so:

def ParseXmlTagContents(source, tag, tagContentsRegex):
    openTagString = "<"+tag+">"
    closeTagString = "</"+tag+">"
    found = re.search(openTagString + tagContentsRegex + closeTagString, source)
    if found:   
        start = found.regs[0][0]
        end = found.regs[0][1]
        return source[start+len(openTagString):end-len(closeTagString)]
    return ""

Example usage would be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<parentNode>
    <childNode>123</childNode>
</parentNode>

ParseXmlTagContents(xmlString, "childNode", "[0-9]+")

Answer 5

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()

Answer 6

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"""<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf8'?>
<osm generator="pycrocosm server" version="0.6"><changeset created_at="2017-09-06T19:26:50.302136+00:00" id="273" max_lat="0.0" max_lon="0.0" min_lat="0.0" min_lon="0.0" open="true" uid="345" user="john"><tag k="test" v="Съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок да выпей чаю" /><tag k="foo" v="bar" /><discussion><comment data="2015-01-01T18:56:48Z" uid="1841" user="metaodi"><text>Did you verify those street names?</text></comment></discussion></changeset></osm>"""

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

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

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

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.