xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError invalid token in sitemap.xml

TL;DR

The sitemap contains characters that are illegal in raw XML, almost always a bare & in a URL or a stray control character. Fetch the raw bytes, find the offending character, and either fix the source sitemap or pre-clean the text before parsing.

xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError invalid token in sitemap.xml

Use this when

• ElementTree fails on a downloaded sitemap.xml.
• The error names "invalid token" with a line and column.
• A sitemap that used to parse now fails.

Not for this skill when

• The XML is well-formed but the schema is wrong. That is a validation problem, not a parse problem.
• You control the sitemap generator. Fix the generator instead of cleaning output.

Steps

1. Save the raw response bytes to a file before parsing. Verify: the file size is nonzero.
2. Open the file at the line and column from the error message. Verify: you can see the exact offending character.
3. Look for bare & in URLs (it must be written in its escaped form), unescaped quotes in attributes, or non-UTF8 bytes. Verify: you can point at the bad character.
4. If you own the source, fix the generator to escape URLs properly. Verify: a fresh download parses cleanly.
5. If you do not own the source, replace the bad characters in a pre-pass, then parse the cleaned text with ElementTree. Verify: parsing succeeds and the URL count looks right.

Variant phrasings

sitemap xml parse error python

General search for the same failure.

elementtree invalid token

Parser-level search.

sitemap contains invalid xml character

Symptom-level search.

Compatibility: Python 3.x xml.etree.ElementTree. The strict parser rejects invalid tokens with no recovery mode; lxml offers a recover option if you can add the dependency.

Why it happens

Sitemaps are machine-generated, and generators sometimes concatenate raw URLs containing & or control characters into XML without escaping. XML parsers are strict by design: one illegal character anywhere fails the whole document, and the error points at the first offense only.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• A byte-order mark at the start of the file can confuse naive decoders. Decode as utf-8-sig before parsing.
• After fixing the first invalid token, parse again. There is often a second one further down.
• Pre-cleaning with string replacement is a workaround, not a fix. Log the bad URLs and report them to the sitemap owner.
• Huge sitemaps (50k URLs) should be parsed with iterparse, not fromstring, to bound memory.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_th0v5wWXiBVCZ7qHpRP1ig

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_th0v5wWXiBVCZ7qHpRP1ig

Thread query: xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError invalid token in sitemap.xml

TL;DR: The sitemap contains characters that are illegal in raw XML, almost always a bare & in a URL or a stray control character. Fetch the raw bytes, find the offending character, and either fix the source sitemap or pre-clean the text before parsing.