Question

I have written a small function, which uses ElementTree to parse xml file,but it is throwing the following error “xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, column 0”. please find the code below

tree = ElementTree.parse(urllib2.urlopen('http://api.ean.com/ean-services/rs/hotel/v3/list?type=xml&apiKey=czztdaxrhfbusyp685ut6g6v&cid=8123&locale=en_US&city=Dallas%20&stateProvinceCode=TX&countryCode=US&minorRev=12'))

rootElem = tree.getroot()

hotel_list = rootElem.findall("HotelList")  

Answer 1

There are multiple problems with the site you are using:

• Site you are using somehow doesn’t honour type=xml you are sending as GET arg, instead you will need to send accept header, telling site that you accept XML else it returns JSON data

• Site is not accepting content-type text/xml so you need to send application/xml

• Your parse call is correct, it is wrongly mentioned in other answer that it should take data, instead parse takes file name or file type object

So here is the working code

import urllib2
from xml.etree import ElementTree

url = 'http://api.ean.com/ean-services/rs/hotel/v3/list?type=xml&apiKey=czztdaxrhfbusyp685ut6g6v&cid=8123&locale=en_US&city=Dallas%20&stateProvinceCode=TX&countryCode=US&minorRev=12'
request = urllib2.Request(url, headers={"Accept" : "application/xml"})
u = urllib2.urlopen(request)
tree = ElementTree.parse(u)
rootElem = tree.getroot()
hotel_list = rootElem.findall("HotelList")  
print hotel_list

output:

[<Element 'HotelList' at 0x248cd90>]

Note I am creating a Request object and passing Accept header

btw if site is returning JSON why you need to parse XML, parsing JSON is simpler and you will get a ready made python object.