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To: python-list@python.org
From: Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de>
Subject: Re: XML parsing ExpatError with xml.dom.minidom at line 1, column 0
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 21:10:34 +0100
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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...