OSError: [Errno 36] File name too long:

Question

I need to convert a web page to XML (using Python 3.4.3). If I write the contents of the URL to a file then I can read and parse it perfectly but if I try to re

Answer 1

As explained in the Parsing XML section of the ElementTree docs:

We can import this data by reading from a file:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('country_data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

Or directly from a string:

root = ET.fromstring(country_data_as_string)

You're passing the whole XML contents as a giant pathname. Your XML file is probably bigger than 2K, or whatever the maximum pathname size is for your platform, hence the error. If it weren't, you'd just get a different error about there being no directory named [everything up to the first / in your XML file].

Just use fromstring instead of parse.

Or, notice that parse can take a file object, not just a filename. And the thing returned by urlopen is a file object.

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Also notice the very next line in that section:

fromstring() parses XML from a string directly into an Element, which is the root element of the parsed tree. Other parsing functions may create an ElementTree.

So, you don't want that root = tree.getroot() either.

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So:

# ...
content.close()
root = ElementTree.fromstring(xmlData)