OSError: [Errno 36] File name too long:

Question

I need to convert a web page to XML (using Python 3.4.3). If I write the contents of the URL to a file then I can read and parse it perfectly but if I try to read directly from the web page I get the following error in my terminal:

File "./AnimeXML.py", line 22, in xml = ElementTree.parse (xmlData) File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1187, in parse tree.parse(source, parser) File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4/lib/python3.4/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 587, in parse source = open(source, "rb") OSError: [Errno 36] File name too long:

My python code:

# AnimeXML.py
#! /usr/bin/Python

# Import xml parser.
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ElementTree

# XML to parse.
sampleUrl = "http://cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.xml?anime=16989"

# Read the xml as a file.
content = urlopen (sampleUrl)

# XML content is stored here to start working on it.
xmlData = content.readall().decode('utf-8')

# Close the file.
content.close()

# Start parsing XML.
xml = ElementTree.parse (xmlData)

# Get root of the XML file.
root = xml.getroot()

for info in root.iter("info"):
    print (info.attrib)

Is there any way I can fix my code so that I can read the web page directly into python without getting this error?

Answer 1

As explained in the Parsing XML section of the ElementTree docs:

We can import this data by reading from a file:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('country_data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

Or directly from a string:

root = ET.fromstring(country_data_as_string)

You're passing the whole XML contents as a giant pathname. Your XML file is probably bigger than 2K, or whatever the maximum pathname size is for your platform, hence the error. If it weren't, you'd just get a different error about there being no directory named [everything up to the first / in your XML file].

Just use fromstring instead of parse.

Or, notice that parse can take a file object, not just a filename. And the thing returned by urlopen is a file object.

---

Also notice the very next line in that section:

fromstring() parses XML from a string directly into an Element, which is the root element of the parsed tree. Other parsing functions may create an ElementTree.

So, you don't want that root = tree.getroot() either.

---

So:

# ...
content.close()
root = ElementTree.fromstring(xmlData)