CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlpython-3.xxml-parsing
monchisan
monchisan

Reputation: 658

Why can't I read a XML example file. xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: syntax error: line 1, column 0

I am new to programming and python. I want to learn to modify a XML file through Python 3.6. I created a XML file as in https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html

Exemple file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
    <country name="Liechtenstein">
        <rank>1</rank>
        <year>2008</year>
        <gdppc>141100</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Austria" direction="E"/>
        <neighbor name="Switzerland" direction="W"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Singapore">
        <rank>4</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>59900</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Malaysia" direction="N"/>
    </country>
    <country name="Panama">
        <rank>68</rank>
        <year>2011</year>
        <gdppc>13600</gdppc>
        <neighbor name="Costa Rica" direction="W"/>
        <neighbor name="Colombia" direction="E"/>
    </country>
</data>

When I test the first block:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('C:\Program Files\Python36\programele\country_data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
print(root)

it gives me this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Program Files/Python36/programele/farmi.py", line 3, in <module>
    tree = ET.parse('C:\Program Files\Python36\programele\country_data.xml')
  File "C:\Program Files\Python36\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 1196, in parse
    tree.parse(source, parser)
  File "C:\Program Files\Python36\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 597, in parse
    self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)
  File "<string>", line None
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: syntax error: line 1, column 0

I even tried this ET.fromstring(open('country_data.xml').read()) and it doesn't work.

I appreciate any advice and information.

Thank you

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4702

Answers (1)

Muhammad Husnain
Muhammad Husnain

Reputation: 31

What I found in my case was that the xml file was invalid. That is, the file did not have the xml file Structure. What I would suggest you to do is check out the content of the xml file by opening up in a text editor and the file structure could be easily viewed.

However, if you are processing a lot of xml files, and you do not know if any your xml file is invalid, you should consider adding a "try/except" block in your Python code. Like this:

try: tree = ET.parse(file) root = tree.getroot() except: pass

Upvotes: 3

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