How to parse xml from url

Question

Generally, what I want to do is parsing xml from url. This is what I have done:

1. I write the xml code on html file enclosed on <'textarea'><'\textarea'> tag:

   <textarea rows="1000" cols="200" style="border:none;">
   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <data>
     <gambar>
       <id>wcl01</id>
       <url>https://1.bp.blogspot.com/- j9yARC6mAuY/Xp4aUTxe6eI/AAAAAAAAAGA/NegvRkwYdVAXhnTsrWoXYcjAzsHfR6BOQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Konferensi%2BIIWAS%2Bdi%2BVietnam.jpg</url>
     </gambar>
     <gambar>
       <id>wcl02</id>
       <url>https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aIkYkd3ePMY/XqDDsTMYMAI/AAAAAAAAAHA/QKZOQ8cPr_0LUfLNrYrA3w6gvNV-ao-QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Konferensi%2BAptikom%2Bdi%2BBandung%2B1.jpg</url>
     </gambar>
   </data>
   </textarea>
   

On the website, this is how it looks:

2. Then I parse the xml using this code:

   from urllib.request import urlopen
   from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse
   from lxml import etree
   var_url = urlopen('https://imanparyudi.000webhostapp.com/gambar.html')
   xmldoc = parse(var_url)
   elem = etree.XML(xmldoc, parser=parser)
   

but I got this error:

    File "<string>", line unknown ParseError: XML or text declaration not at start of entity: line 2, column 0

I assume that this error is caused by whitespace at the beginning of the xml code. So, I have tried to remove this whitespace using, first: etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True) and second: etree.XMLParser(recover=True) like this:

    from urllib.request import urlopen
    from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse
    from lxml import etree
    parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
    var_url = urlopen('https://imanparyudi.000webhostapp.com/gambar.html')
    xmldoc = parse(var_url)
    elem = etree.XML(xmldoc, parser=parser)

and

    from urllib.request import urlopen
    from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse
    from lxml import etree
    parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True)
    var_url = urlopen('https://imanparyudi.000webhostapp.com/gambar.html')
    xmldoc = parse(var_url)
    elem = etree.XML(xmldoc, parser=parser)

But, both ways give the same error:

    File "<string>", line unknown ParseError: XML or text declaration not at start of entity: line 2, column 0

3. So, my questions here are:

a. Is this problem cause by the use of <'textarea'><'\textarea'> tag?

b. If so, how can I post my xml code on a website?

c. If not, how can solve this ParseError?

Answer 1

You get back HTML doc.
Inside the HTML there is <textarea> that holds the XML doc.
The code below point to the XML doc and parse it.

import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

r = requests.get('https://imanparyudi.000webhostapp.com/gambar.html')
if r.status_code == 200:
    start = r.text.find('<?xml')
    end = r.text.find('</textarea>')
    root = ET.fromstring(r.text[start:end])
    print(root)

Answer 2

It's probably because you're missing this at the beginning of the document

Answer 3

Cause

An XML declaration,

<?xml version="1.0"?>

may only appear once and only at the very top on an XML document.

Clearly, having

<textarea rows="1000" cols="200" style="border:none;">

ahead of it violates that requirement.

Remedies

• Since you're only specifying that the XML is version 1.0, and that's the default anyway, simply remove the XML declaration, or
• Remove everything before the XML declaration.

See also

• Error: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed