&nbsp text not handled by the lxml

Question

My html file has the following line

<tr><td>$nbsp;</td><tr> 

But when I do the parsing with lxml:

from lxml import tree as ET
tree = ET.parse("file.html")

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "lxml.etree.pyx", line 3310, in lxml.etree.parse (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:72517)
File "parser.pxi", line 1791, in lxml.etree._parseDocument (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:105979)
File "parser.pxi", line 1817, in lxml.etree._parseDocumentFromURL (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:106278)
File "parser.pxi", line 1721, in lxml.etree._parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:105277)
File "parser.pxi", line 1122, in lxml.etree._BaseParser._parseDocFromFile (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:100227)
File "parser.pxi", line 580, in lxml.etree._ParserContext._handleParseResultDoc (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:94350)
File "parser.pxi", line 690, in lxml.etree._handleParseResult (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:95786)
File "parser.pxi", line 620, in lxml.etree._raiseParseError (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:94853)
lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Entity 'nbsp' not defined, line 14, column 159

Answer 1

Use lxml.html, not lxml.etree, for HTML.   is legitimately not predefined in XML, but it's available for HTML. Thus:

>>> lxml.html.fromstring('''<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><tr>''')
<Element div at 0x10a7a5e68>

...works properly.

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Alternately, you can use the XML equivalent for  , which is  , in your document, or you can declare a DOCTYPE in your XML file and include <!ENTITY nbsp "&#160;"> in its contents.