Parse broken XML with lxml

lxml parses XML based on libxml2, but BeautifulSoup parses XML based on regular expressions, so you can parse broken XML like the one below.

For situations where you want to use lxml for speed, but you may need BeautifulSoup, and you are wondering which one to use, lxml provides the following interface.

Suppose the input is broken XML like the one below.

<piyo>bar</piyo>
<piyo>hoge</piyo>

result

python

In [1]: from lxml import etree
In [2]: with open('hoge') as f:
   ...:     xml=etree.fromstring(f.read())
   ...:       File "<string>", line unknown　XMLSyntaxError: Extra content at the end of the document, line 2, column 1

python

In [3]: from lxml.html.soupparser import fromstring

In [4]: with open('hoge') as f:
   ...:     xml=fromstring(f.read())
   ...:

In [5]: for piyo in xml.findall('piyo'): print piyo.text.strip()
bar
hoge

reference

http://lxml.de/elementsoup.html