Mike,
I haven't used minidom extensively but my guess is that 
doc.toprettyxml(indent=" ",encoding="utf-8") isn't actually changing the 
encoding because it can't parse the string in your content variable. I'm 
surprised that you're not getting tossed a UnicodeError, but The docs 
for Node.toxml() [1] might shed some light:

> To avoid UnicodeError exceptions in case of unrepresentable text data, 
> the encoding argument should be specified as “utf-8”.

So what happens if you're not explicit about the encoding, i.e. just 
doc.toprettyxml()? This would hopefully at least move your exception to 
a more appropriate place.

In any case, one solution would be to scrub the string in your content 
variable to get rid of the invalid characters (hopefully they're 
insignificant). Maybe something like this:

def unicode_filter(char):
     try:
         unicode(char, encoding='utf-8', errors='strict')
         return char
     except UnicodeDecodeError:
         return ''

content = 'abc\xFF'
content = ''.join(map(unicode_filter, content))
print content

Not really my area of expertise, but maybe worth a shot....
-Jon

1. 
http://docs.python.org/2/library/xml.dom.minidom.html#xml.dom.minidom.Node.toxml

-- 
Jon Stroop
Digital Initiatives Programmer/Analyst
Princeton University Library
[log in to unmask]




On 03/04/2013 03:00 PM, Michael Beccaria wrote:
> I'm working on a project that takes the ocr data found in a pdf and places it in a custom xml file.
>
> I use Python scripts to create the xml file. Something like this (trimmed down a bit):
>
> from xml.dom.minidom import Document
> doc = Document()
> 	Page = doc.createElement("Page")
> 	doc.appendChild(Page)
> 	f = StringIO(txt)
> 	lines = f.readlines()
> 	for line in lines:
> 	word = doc.createElement("String")
> 		...
> 		word.setAttribute("CONTENT",content)
> 		Page.appendChild(word)
> 	return doc.toprettyxml(indent="  ",encoding="utf-8")	
>
>
> This creates a file, simply, that looks like this:
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> <Page HEIGHT="3296" WIDTH="2609">
>    <String CONTENT="BuffaloLaunch" />
>    <String CONTENT="Club" />
>    <String CONTENT="Offices" />
>    <String CONTENT="Installed" />
>    ...
> </Page>
>
> I am able to get this document to be created ok and saved to an xml file. The problem occurs when I try and have it read using the lxml library:
>
> from lxml import etree
> doc = etree.parse(filename)
>
>
> I am running across errors like "XMLSyntaxError: Char 0xFFFF out of allowed range, line 94, column 19". Which when I look at the file, is true. There is a 0XFFFF character in the content field.
>
> How is a file able to be created using minidom (which I assume would create a valid xml file) and then failing when parsing with lxml? What should I do to fix this on the encoding side so that errors don't show up on the parsing side?
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
> How is the
> Mike Beccaria
> Systems Librarian
> Head of Digital Initiative
> Paul Smith's College
> 518.327.6376
> [log in to unmask]
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