How to read an xml file with & sign

Question

This is my

xml

file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE papers>

<papers>

  <paper>

    <title>Title containing & and more</title>

  </paper>

</papers>

How do I read that using

lxml

's

etree

? I tried

from lxml import etree



with open(xml_file, 'r') as inf:

    tree = etree.parse(inf)

but it results in the following Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>

  File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 3239, in lxml.etree.parse (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:69955)

  File "parser.pxi", line 1769, in lxml.etree._parseDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:102257)

  File "parser.pxi", line 1789, in lxml.etree._parseFilelikeDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:102516)

  File "parser.pxi", line 1684, in lxml.etree._parseDocFromFilelike (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:101442)

  File "parser.pxi", line 1134, in lxml.etree._BaseParser._parseDocFromFilelike (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:97069)

  File "parser.pxi", line 582, in lxml.etree._ParserContext._handleParseResultDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:91275)

  File "parser.pxi", line 683, in lxml.etree._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:92461)

  File "parser.pxi", line 622, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:91757)

lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: xmlParseEntityRef: no name, line 5, column 30

Answer 1

If you need to retain the & character, you can parse the file as HTML.

from lxml import html
tree = html.parse(path)

If you don't need the & character, you can create a new XML parser and pass the recover=True option.

from lxml import etree
parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True)
tree = etree.parse(path, parser=parser)

How to read an xml file with & sign

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