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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
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