Error ‘failed to load external entity’ when using Python lxml

December 3, 2023 by Tarik

In concert with what mzjn said, if you do want to pass a string to etree.parse(), just wrap it in a StringIO object.

Example:

from lxml import etree
from StringIO import StringIO

myString = "<html><p>blah blah blah</p></html>"

tree = etree.parse(StringIO(myString))

This method is used in the lxml documentation.