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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T15:59:40+00:00

I inherited someone elses (dreadful) codebase, and am currently desperately trying to fix things.

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I inherited someone elses (dreadful) codebase, and am currently desperately trying to fix things. Today, that means gathering a list of all the dead links in our template/homepage.

I’m currently using ElementTree in Python, trying to parse the site using xpath. Unfortunately, it seems that the html is malformed, and ElementTree keeps throwing errors.

Are there more error friendly xpath parsers? Is there a way to run ElementTree in a non-strict mode? Are there any other methods, such as preprocessing, that can be used to help this process?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    LXML can parse some malformed HTML, implements an extended version of the ElementTree API, and supports XPath:

    >>> from lxml import html
>>> t = html.fromstring("""<html><body>Hello! <p> Goodbye.</body></html""")
>>> html.tostring(t.xpath("//body")[0])
'<body>Hello! <p> Goodbye.</p></body>'
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