xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError -- exception handling not catching errors

Question

I'm trying to parse an xml document that has a number of undefined entities that cause a ParseError when I try to run my code, which is as follows:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('cic.fam_lat.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

while True:
    try:
        for name in root.iter('name'):
            print(root.tag, name.text)
    except xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError:
        pass

for name in root.iter('name'):
    print(name.text)

An example of said error is as follows, and there are a number of undefined entities that will all throw the same error:

I just want to ignore them rather than go in and edit out each one. How should I edit my exception handling to catch these error instances? (i.e., what am I doing wrong?)

Sandi

Answer 1

There are some workarounds, like defining custom entities, suggested at:

• Python ElementTree support for parsing unknown XML entities?

But, if you are able to switch to lxml, its XMLParser() can work in the "recover" mode that would "ignore" the undefined entities:

import lxml.etree as ET

parser = ET.XMLParser(recover=True)
tree = ET.parse('cic.fam_lat.xml', parser=parser)

for name in root.iter('name'):
    print(root.tag, name.text)

(worked for me - got the tag names and texts printed)

Romano

Excellent, thank you! Yeah, lxml seems to be the way to go -- recover mode worked perfectly. Now just to figure out how to get to a certain parent tag from each instance of <name>... – Sandi

This doesn't really answer the question. Why is the ParseError not caught? – Mcburney

@LondonRob: The exception is thrown already at tree = ET.parse('cic.fam_lat.xml'). The document is ill-formed because of the undefined entity and ElementTree refuses to parse it. – Triceratops

Answer 2

You can catch the exception simply by referencing the ParseError like this:

try:
    # Something neat

except ET.ParseError:
    # Exception catch

This is on Python 3.7.10, Windows 10.

Schnauzer