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Asked: 2026-06-06T21:00:19+00:00

I’m parsing the xml files encoded with utf-16 using ElementTree.parse function. The program would

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I’m parsing the xml files encoded with utf-16 using ElementTree.parse function.
The program would break down when the file contains some not well-formed characters such as ♀, ♂ .etc. And the error “xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: not well-formed (invalid token)“occurs.
How could I avoid this error and resolve this problem? How could I just ignore these not well-formed characters? Thanks! below is my code：

tree = ElementTree()
root = tree.parse(xml_file)

xml_file is the file encoded in UTF-16 format.
The error would point out the line and column number of the not well-formed character.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since xml.parsers.expat.ParserCreate supports only four encodings I would try them all. Those encodings are:
    UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1 (Latin1), and ASCII .

    You can now run ElementTree.parse with the encoding like:

    from xml.etree.ElementTree import ElementTree
from xml.parsers import expat
tree = ElementTree()
root = tree.parse(xml_file, parser=expat.ParserCreate('UTF-8') )
root = tree.parse(xml_file, parser=expat.ParserCreate('UTF-16') )
root = tree.parse(xml_file, parser=expat.ParserCreate('ISO-8859-1') )
root = tree.parse(xml_file, parser=expat.ParserCreate('ASCII') )
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