"XML Or Text Declaration Not At Start Of Entity: Line 2, Column 0" When Calling ElementTree.parse

ElementTree.parse() fails in the simple example below with the error xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: XML or text declaration not at start of entity: line 2, column 0 The XML lo

Solution 1:

You have a newline at the beginning of the XML string, remove it:

xmlExample = """<?xml version="1.0"?>
...

Or, you may just strip() the XML string:

source = io.StringIO(xmlExample.strip())

As a side note, you don't have to create a file-like buffer, and use .fromstring() instead:

root = ET.fromstring(xmlExample)

Solution 2:

Found it... whitespace in front of 1st element...