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Everything you need to level up your coding skills.

XML

Mismatched Tag Errors in Large XML Files and Finding Them

Locate an Opening and ending tag mismatch in a 28.6 MB XML file four ways: the parser, per-tag counts, record-by-record parsing and bisection, with timings.

6 min read

XML

Content Is Not Allowed in Prolog and the Hidden BOM

What Content is not allowed in prolog means in Java: a BOM decoded to text, a double BOM, JSON or text instead of XML, and how to diagnose it.

6 min read

XML

Undefined Entity Errors in XML and the Ampersand Problem

Fix undefined entity and Entity not defined errors in XML from HTML entities like nbsp and eacute: convert to numeric references, a DOCTYPE, or lxml recover.

6 min read

XML

Invalid Character in XML and Stripping Control Characters

Fix PCDATA invalid Char value and reference to invalid character number: which characters XML 1.0 forbids, how to strip them from 28 MB in 0.03 s and verify.

6 min read

XML

Premature End of Data in Tag and What Usually Caused It

Why XML fails with Premature end of data in tag: truncated downloads, cut gzip streams and empty responses, how each message differs, and what to check.

7 min read

XML

XML Parsing Error Not Well Formed and How to Find the Spot

Read the not well-formed error in ElementTree, lxml and xmllint on a 28.6 MB file: line and column, what the position means and a method to find the cause.

7 min read

XMLGuide

Fixing XML Parse Errors Fast With a Triage Routine

A tested routine for XML that will not parse: check the bytes, then the encoding, then the characters, then the structure, with an error message dictionary.

19 min read

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