XML parsing ExpatError with xml.dom.minidom at line 1, column 0

[MRAB]

On 2014-02-13 20:10, Peter Otten wrote:
> ming wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> i've a Python script which stopped working about a month ago.   But until
>> then, it worked flawlessly for months (if not years).   A tiny
>> self-contained 7-line script is provided below.
>>
>> i ran into an XML parsing problem with xml.dom.minidom and the error
>> message is included below.  The weird thing is if i used an XML validator
>> on the web to validate against this particular URL directly, it is all
>> good.   Moreover, i saved the page source in Firefox or Chrome then
>> validated against the saved XML file, it's also all good.
>>
>> Since the error happened at the very beginning of the input (line 1,
>> column 0) as indicated below, i was wondering if this is an encoding
>> mismatch.  However, according to the saved page source in FireFox or
>> Chrome, there is the following at the beginning:
>>    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>>
>>
>> <program>
>> =================================================
>> #!/usr/bin/env python
>>
>> import urllib2
>> from xml.dom.minidom import parseString
>>
>> fd = urllib2.urlopen('http://api.worldbank.org/countries')
>> data = fd.read()
>> fd.close()
>> dom = parseString(data)
>> =================================================
>>
>>
>> <error msg>
>> =================================================
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "./bugReport.py", line 9, in <module>
>>     dom = parseString(data)
>>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1931, in parseString
>>     return expatbuilder.parseString(string)
>>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 940, in
>>   parseString
>>     return builder.parseString(string)
>>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 223, in
>>   parseString
>>     parser.Parse(string, True)
>> xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1,
>> column 0 =================================================
>>
>>
>> i'm running Python 2.7.5+ on Ubuntu 13.10.
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> Looking into the data returned from the server:
>
>>>> data = urllib2.urlopen("http://api.worldbank.org/countries").read()
>>>> with open("tmp.dat", "w") as f: f.write(data)
> ...
>>>>
> [1]+  Angehalten              python
> $ file tmp.dat
> tmp.dat: gzip compressed data, from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT)
>
> OK, let's expand:
>
> $ fg
> python
>
>
>>>> import gzip, StringIO
>>>> expanded_data = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=StringIO.StringIO(data)).read()
>>>> import xml.dom.minidom
>>>> xml.dom.minidom.parseString(expanded_data)
> <xml.dom.minidom.Document instance at 0x19a1320>
>
> There may be a way to uncompress the gzipped data transparently, but I'm too
> lazy to look it up...
>
 From a brief look at the docs, it looks like you can specify the
format. For example, for JSON:

     fd = urlopen('http://api.worldbank.org/countries?format=json')