ElementTree: can't figure out a mismached-tag error

Thu Jul 11 04:59:16 EDT 2013

Hi all,
I haven't been able to get up to speed with XML. I do examples from the 
tutorials and experiment with variations. Time and time again I fail 
with errors messages I can't make sense of. Here's the latest one. The 
url is "http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ&ql=0". Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 
Python 2.7.3 (default, Aug 1 2012, 05:16:07) [GCC 4.6.3]
 >>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
 >>> tree = ET.parse('q?s=XIDEQ') # output of wget 
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ&ql=0
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<pyshell#69>", line 1, in <module>
 tree = ET.parse('q?s=XIDEQ')
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1183, in parse
 tree.parse(source, parser)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 656, in parse
 parser.feed(data)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1643, in feed
 self._raiseerror(v)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1507, in 
_raiseerror
 raise err
ParseError: mismatched tag: line 9, column 2
Below first nine lines. The line numbers and the following space are 
hand-edited in. Three dots stand for sections cut out to fit long lines. 
Line 6 is a bunch of "meta" statements, all of which I show on a 
separate line each in order to preserve the angled brackets. On all 
lines the angled brackets have been preserved. The mismatched character 
is the slash of the closing tag </head>. What could be wrong with it? 
And if it is, what about fault tolerance?
1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD . . . /strict.dtd">
2 <html lang="en-US">
3 <head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
4 <title>XIDEQ: Summary for EXIDE TECH NEW- Yahoo! Finance</title>
5 <meta name="description" xml:space="default" content="View the basic 
XIDEQ . . .
6 . . . other companies."><meta name="keywords" content="XIDEQ, EXIDE 
TECH . . .">
 <meta property="fb:app_id" content="118155468215844">
 <meta property="fb:admins" content="503762770,100001149693905">
 <meta property="og:type" content="company">
 <meta property="og:site_name" content="Yahoo! Finance">
 <meta property="og:title" content="Exide Technologies">
 <meta property="og:image" 
content="http://l.yimg.com/a/p/fi/31/09/00.jpg">
 <meta property="og:url" content="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ">
 <meta property="og:description" content="View the basic XIDEQ . . .
7 other companies."><link rel="canonical" 
href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XIDEQ">
8 <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://l.yimg.com/zz/ . . . type="text/css">
9 </head>
 ^
 Mismatch!
Thanks for suggestions
Frederic