# Python and XML and the agony of defeat

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-05-10T07:41:43Z


I learned Python (thanks to Sen) in a week. I wrote a birthday script, a script to scrape blogshares and put the shareholders in my sidebar and even wrote a vcard handler. I was on a roll. Then... Sifry sent me some Technorati stuff to mess with. XML? Cool, should be easy. I was just about to do the Parsing XML section of Dive Into Python anyway. Great! ...notDive Into PythonAs I was saying, actually parsing an XML document is very simple: one line of code.  Where you go from there is up to you.So 2 hours later, I have 4 different installations of Python on my PowerBook and one on my FreeBSD machine and I can't get Mark's first example to work>>> xmldoc = minidom.parse('~/diveintopython/common/py/kgp/binary.xml') I've just about given up. The O'Reilly Python & XML is cryptic, I've googled around and tried a bunch of stuff and am totally frustrated. I guess I thought I was becoming a programmer, but I'm just a wimpy little script kiddie. >sigh<
So for those of you who are interested in how far I've gotten. I did see a post by Mark that the Python that comes with OS X doesn't have the necessary XML libraries so I downloaded PyXML. Well, when I try to install it, it says "NameError: name 'distutils' is not defined"

On my FreeBSD Box the Python error is:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.2/site-packages/_xmlplus/dom/minidom.py", line 19
15, in parse
    return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.2/site-packages/_xmlplus/dom/expatbuilder.py", li
ne 924, in parse
    result = builder.parseFile(fp)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.2/site-packages/_xmlplus/dom/expatbuilder.py", li
ne 207, in parseFile
    parser.Parse(buffer, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: undefined entity: line 119, column 366




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