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Asked: 2026-05-27T23:32:27+00:00

I’m getting this error in my python program: ValueError: All strings must be XML

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I’m getting this error in my python program: ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes or control characters

This question, random text from /dev/random raising an error in lxml: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes, explains the issue.

The solution was to filter out certain bytes, but I’m confused about how to go about doing this.

Any help?

Edit: sorry if i didn’t give enough info about the problem. the string data comes from an external api query of which i have no control over the how the data is formatted.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As the answer to the linked question said, the XML standard defines a valid character as:

    Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]

    Translating that into Python:

    def valid_xml_char_ordinal(c):
    codepoint = ord(c)
    # conditions ordered by presumed frequency
    return (
        0x20 <= codepoint <= 0xD7FF or
        codepoint in (0x9, 0xA, 0xD) or
        0xE000 <= codepoint <= 0xFFFD or
        0x10000 <= codepoint <= 0x10FFFF
        )

    You can then use that function however you need to, e.g.

    cleaned_string = ''.join(c for c in input_string if valid_xml_char_ordinal(c))
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