how to pass an xml file to lxml to parse?

Question

I'm trying to parse an xml file using lxml. xml.etree allowed me to simply pass the file name as a parameter to the parse function, so I attempted to do the same with lxml.

My code:

from lxml import etree
from lxml import objectify

file = "C:\Projects\python\cb.xml"
tree = etree.parse(file)

but I get the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "cb.py", line 5, in <module>
    tree = etree.parse(file)
  File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 2698, in lxml.etree.parse (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:4
9590)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1491, in lxml.etree._parseDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etre
e.c:71205)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1520, in lxml.etree._parseDocumentFromURL (src/lxml/lx
ml.etree.c:71488)
  File "parser.pxi", line 1420, in lxml.etree._parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.e
tree.c:70583)
  File "parser.pxi", line 975, in lxml.etree._BaseParser._parseDocFromFile (src/
lxml/lxml.etree.c:67736)
  File "parser.pxi", line 539, in lxml.etree._ParserContext._handleParseResultDo
c (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:63820)
  File "parser.pxi", line 625, in lxml.etree._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.e
tree.c:64741)
  File "parser.pxi", line 565, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etr
ee.c:64084)
lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: AttValue: " or ' expected, line 2, column 26

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What you are doing wrong is (1) not checking whether you got the same outcome by using xml.etree on the same file (2) not reading the error message, which indicates a syntax error in line 2 of the file, way down stream from any file-opening issue

Answer 2

I stumbled across a similar error message this morning, and for me the answer was a malformed DTD. In my DTD, there was an Attribute definition with a default value that was not enclosed in quotes - as soon as I changed that, the error didn't happen anymore.