让 lxml 对 XML 片段进行编码

Question

I'm having a bit of an issue with encoding some XML using lxml. Specifically I had this xml fragment:

<p>first para</p><p><ul><li>item1</li><li>item2</li></ul></p>

In my code I was using:

_before = fragment_fromstring(_before)

However, this gave me:

<p>first para</p><p/><ul><li>item1</li><li>item2</li></ul>

This is because in HTML you don't wrap paragraphs around lists. However, I can and need to do that in this particular case in XML.

I have tried:

_before = et.fromstring(_before)

however, that is giving me this error:

lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: error parsing attribute name, line 1, column 972

Looking through the docs, I can't see a way to tell lxml, I'm giving you an xml fragment, and I don't care at the minute if I have a root element (I'm actually building all of that as I go).

Anybody know how I might pass lxml an XML code fragment and get an encoded lxml fragment?

Answer 1

I'm now using the parser.feed option, which is in fact also showing this parsing error, but looking at my XML written to this point, I now see why. Seems that some of my hand written XML (there's a reason not to do this, I know), has a couple of minor issues that when I used the fragment_fromstring was actually correcting for me. Fixing those errors and using parser.feed seems to have resolved this issue.