Error 'failed to load external entity' when using Python lxml
I'm trying to parse an XML document I retrieve from the web, but it crashes after parsing with this error:
': failed to load external entity "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="GreenButtonDataStyleSheet.xslt"?>
That is the second line in the XML that is downloaded. Is there a way to prevent the parser from trying to load the external entity, or another way to solve this? This is the code I have so far:
import urllib2
import lxml.etree as etree
file = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.greenbuttondata.org/data/15MinLP_15Days.xml")
data = file.read()
file.close()
tree = etree.parse(data)
Answer
In concert with what mzjn said, if you do want to pass a string to etree.parse(), just wrap it in a StringIO object.
Example:
from lxml import etree
from StringIO import StringIO
myString = "<html><p>blah blah blah</p></html>"
tree = etree.parse(StringIO(myString))
This method is used in the lxml documentation.