Parsing huge, badly encoded XML files in Python

Question

I have been working on code that parses external XML-files. Some of these files are huge, up to gigabytes of data. Needless to say, these files need to be parsed as a stream

Answer 1

I used a similar piece of code:

 illegalxml = re.compile(u'[\x00-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1F\uD800-\uDFFF\uFFFE\uFFFF]')

...

illegalxml.sub("?",mystring)

...

However, this did not work for all possible strings (400+MB string).

For a final solution I used decoding/encoding as follows:

outxml = "C:/path_to/xml_output_file.xml"
with open(outxml, "w") as out:
    valid_xmlstring = mystring.encode('latin1','xmlcharrefreplace').decode('utf8','xmlcharrefreplace')
    out.write(valid_xmlstring)