在python中解析不是纯xml的文件的最佳方法是什么

Question

i am trying to parse a file in python which is not pure xml, since its not purly xml, xml parser fails to parse the file.

please suggest me a solution to this , i dont want to read the file with I/O functions.

<groups>
   <url>
      description = helloz
      <whatis>
         <what_is_that>
            active = yes
            <inside_what>
               <default>
                  <0>
                     tagid = 0

                  </0>
               </default>
            </inside_what>
            <second_list>
               <0>
                  name = do
               </0>
            </second_list>
         </what_is_that>

Answer 1

You can try something like this with BeautifulSoup. When you make a BeautifulSoup object it will insert the missing closing tags by itself. And then you are good to go and extract anything you want.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

with open('file_name', 'r') as f:
    a = f.read()
    soup=BeautifulSoup(a, 'lxml')
    print soup.find('inside_what')

Output:

<inside_what>
<default>

                     tagid = 0

                  0&gt;
               </default>
</inside_what>