ElementTree: can't figure out a mismached-tag error

Thu Jul 11 05:19:58 EDT 2013

Actually, I don't think etree has a HTML parser. And I would counter-recommend lxml if speed is an issue: BeautifulSoup takes a looooong time to parse a large document.

On Thursday, July 11, 2013 5:08:04 PM UTC+8, Fábio Santos wrote:
> On 11 Jul 2013 10:04, "F.R." <anthra... at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> 
> >
> 
> > Hi all,
> 
> >
> 
> > I haven't been able to get up to speed with XML. I do examples from the tutorials and experiment with variations. Time and time again I fail with errors messages I can't make sense of. Here's the latest one. The url is "http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ&ql=0". Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Python 2.7.3 (default, Aug  1 2012, 05:16:07) [GCC 4.6.3]
> 
> 
> >
> 
> > >>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
> 
> > >>> tree = ET.parse('q?s=XIDEQ')  # output of wget http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ&ql=0
> 
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> 
> >   File "<pyshell#69>", line 1, in <module>
> 
> >     tree = ET.parse('q?s=XIDEQ')
> 
> >   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1183, in parse
> 
> >     tree.parse(source, parser)
> 
> >   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 656, in parse
> 
> >     parser.feed(data)
> 
> >   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1643, in feed
> 
> >     self._raiseerror(v)
> 
> >   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1507, in _raiseerror
> 
> >     raise err
> 
> > ParseError: mismatched tag: line 9, column 2
> 
> >
> 
> > Below first nine lines. The line numbers and the following space are hand-edited in. Three dots stand for sections cut out to fit long lines. Line 6 is a bunch of "meta" statements, all of which I show on a separate line each in order to preserve the angled brackets. On all lines the angled brackets have been preserved. The mismatched character is the slash of the closing tag </head>. What could be wrong with it? And if it is, what about fault tolerance?
> 
> 
> >
> 
> > 1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD  . . . /strict.dtd">
> 
> > 2 <html lang="en-US">
> 
> > 3 <head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
> 
> > 4 <title>XIDEQ: Summary for EXIDE TECH NEW- Yahoo! Finance</title>
> 
> > 5 <meta name="description" xml:space="default" content="View the basic XIDEQ . . .
> 
> > 6 . . . other companies."><meta name="keywords" content="XIDEQ, EXIDE TECH . . .">
> 
> >   <meta property="fb:app_id" content="118155468215844">
> 
> >   <meta property="fb:admins" content="503762770,100001149693905">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:type" content="company">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:site_name" content="Yahoo! Finance">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:title" content="Exide Technologies">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:image" content="http://l.yimg.com/a/p/fi/31/09/00.jpg">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:url" content="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ">
> 
> >   <meta property="og:description" content="View the basic XIDEQ . . .
> 
> > 7 other companies."><link rel="canonical" href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ">
> 
> > 8 <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://l.yimg.com/zz/ . . . type="text/css">
> 
> > 9 </head>
> 
> >    ^
> 
> >     Mismatch!
> 
> >
> 
> > Thanks for suggestions
> 
> >
> 
> > Frederic
> 
> That is not XML. It is HTML. You get a mismatched tag because the <link> tag doesn't need closing in HTML, but in XML every single tag needs closing.
> 
> Use an HTML parser. I strongly recommend  BeautifulSoup but I think etree has an HTML parser too. I am not sure..