Which XML parser can handle an incomplete XML file?

Question

I am trying to parse an XML using SAX Parser but keep getting XML document structures must start and end within the same entity. which is expected as the XML doc I

Answer 1

You cannot use an XML parser to parse a file that does not contain well-formed XML. (It does not have to be valid, just well-formed. For the difference, read Well-formed vs Valid XML.)

By definition, XML must be well-formed, otherwise it is not XML. Parsers in general have to have some fundamental constraints met in order to operate, and for XML parsers, it is well-formedness.

Either repair the file manually first to be well-formed XML, or open it programmatically and parse it as a text file using traditional parsing techniques. An XML parser cannot help you unless you have well-formed XML.

Answer 2

BeautifulSoup in Python can handle incomplete xml really well. I use it to parse prefix of large XML files for preview.

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup('<a><b>foo</b><b>bar<','xml')
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="unicode-escape"?>\n<a><b>foo</b><b>bar</b></a>