pythonunicodeencodingutf-8elementtree

ElementTree and unicode

I have this char in an xml file:

<data>
  <products>
      <color>fumè</color>
  </product>
</data>

I try to generate an instance of ElementTree with the following code:

string_data = open('file.xml')
x = ElementTree.fromstring(unicode(string_data.encode('utf-8')))

and I get the following error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe8' in position 185: ordinal not in range(128)

(NOTE: The position is not exact, I sampled the xml from a larger one).

How to solve it? Thanks

Solution

  • You do not need to decode XML for ElementTree to work. XML carries it's own encoding information (defaulting to UTF-8) and ElementTree does the work for you, outputting unicode:

    >>> data = '''\
... <data>
...   <products>
...       <color>fumè</color>
...   </products>
... </data>
... '''
>>> x = ElementTree.fromstring(data)
>>> x[0][0].text
u'fum\xe8'

    If your data is contained in a file(like) object, just pass the filename or file object directly to the ElementTree.parse() function:

    x = ElementTree.parse('file.xml')