python ntlk donwload gives parser eror

Question

I am trying to run the following command

import nltk
nltk.download('all')

But I am getting this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./update.py", line 3, in <module>
    nltk.download('all')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py", line 664, in download
    for msg in self.incr_download(info_or_id, download_dir, force):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py", line 534, in incr_download
    try: info = self._info_or_id(info_or_id)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py", line 508, in _info_or_id
    return self.info(info_or_id)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py", line 875, in info
    self._update_index()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py", line 825, in _update_index
    ElementTree.parse(compat.urlopen(self._url)).getroot())
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1196, in parse
    tree.parse(source, parser)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 597, in parse
    self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 23, column 143

I am new to python, so I am not really sure what should I do. I looked into the source module reported above and noticed that it is trying to download the xml file. So i ran the below command and did not give me any error.

compat.urlopen('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nltk/nltk_data/gh-pages/index.xml')

So I presume there is no issue in the download, but in the parser. Can someone suggest how do I proceed from here?

Answer 1

index.xml had a typo. It is already patched. Just checked and nltk.download('all') works fine!

see: nltk/nltk_data#70

Answer 2

The problem is with the XML that NLTK has returned.

xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 23, column 143

At 23:143 we see the problem, a missing '=':

... unzip="1" unzipped_size"1917" url="https...

NTLK will surely fix this soon, until then I'm not sure what the best response is.