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

Thu Jul 11 08:25:13 EDT 2013

On 07/11/2013 10:59 AM, F.R. 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
>
Thank you all!

I was a little apprehensive it could be a silly mistake. And so it was. 
I have BeautifulSoup somewhere. Having had no urgent need for it I 
remember shirking the learning curve.

lxml seems to be a package with these components (from help (lxml)):

PACKAGE CONTENTS
     ElementInclude
     _elementpath
     builder
     cssselect
     doctestcompare
     etree
     html (package)
     isoschematron (package)
     objectify
     pyclasslookup
     sax
     usedoctest

I would start with "from lxml import html" and see what comes out.

Break time now. Thanks again!

Frederic