Reading multiple XML in a single file

I need to collect multiple pieces of short XML from a variety of places, all with similar format, in Python. The catch is that they will be presented to me all in one file:

<infodump>
   ...
</infodump>

<infodump>
   ...
</infodump>

and so on. I can find many examples of parsing XML in multiple files (iterating over all the files in a directory, for example), and examples of merging into a single file (with such things as xmlmerge), but I have yet found nothing on parsing multiple examples in the same file.

I try the usual

tree = ET.parse("./id.xml")
root = tree.getroot()

but it chokes on the second XML in the file:

Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Users\dlevey\PycharmProjects\reconcile\main.py", line 27, in <module>
      main()
    File "C:\Users\dlevey\PycharmProjects\reconcile\main.py", line 5, in main
      tree = ET.parse("./id.xml")
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    File "C:\Program Files\Python311\Lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 1218, in parse
      tree.parse(source, parser)
    File "C:\Program Files\Python311\Lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 580, in parse
      self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: junk after document element: line 25, column 0

I'd really rather not split them again into multiple files, or request that they are all sent as individual files, as some of them are coming from the source as a single file, and I'll be processing thousands of XML samples at once.

Like hinted to in the comments, your input is not well-formed (see here for details on well-formed vs valid xml) because it doesn't have a single root element.

The easiest way to solve this is to wrap the input in a root element before parsing.

Here's a simple example that wraps the input xml fragments in an input element...

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

with open("id.xml", "r") as input_file:
    content = input_file.read()

well_formed_input = f"<input>{content}</input>"

root = ET.fromstring(well_formed_input)

for elem in root.findall("infodump"):
    print(elem)

This prints the following output:

<Element 'infodump' at 0x0000020B5FFB8400>
<Element 'infodump' at 0x0000020B5FFB84A0>

As an alternative to Daniel’s suggestion you can use a html parser:

from html.parser import HTMLParser

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        print("Start tag:", tag)

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        print("End tag :", tag)

    def handle_data(self, data):
        print("Some data  :", data)

parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed("""<infodump>
   ...
</infodump>

<infodump>
   ...
</infodump>""")

Output:

Start tag: infodump
Some data  : 
   ...

End tag : infodump
Some data  : 


Start tag: infodump
Some data  : 
   ...

End tag : infodump