OpenBB-finance/OpenBB · error · OpenBBError

Failed to parse XML response: {url} -> {e}

Error message

Failed to parse XML response: {url} -> {e}

What it means

After a successful HTTP 200, fetch_data parses the body with defusedxml; any parse failure (malformed XML, empty body, HTML error page served as 200) is wrapped in OpenBBError with the URL and parser exception.

Source

Thrown at openbb_platform/providers/imf/openbb_imf/utils/query_builder.py:374

        response = None

        try:
            response = make_request(url, headers=headers)
            response.raise_for_status()
            xml_content = response.text
        except RequestException as e:
            res_content = response.text if response else ""
            raise OpenBBError(
                f"An error occurred during the HTTP request: {url} -> {e} -> {res_content}"
            ) from e

        # Parse XML
        try:
            import defusedxml.ElementTree as DefusedET

            root = DefusedET.fromstring(xml_content)
        except Exception as e:  # pylint: disable=broad-except
            raise OpenBBError(f"Failed to parse XML response: {url} -> {e}") from e

        # Define namespaces used in IMF SDMX responses
        namespaces = {
            "message": "http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v3_0/message",
            "ss": "http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v3_0/data/structurespecific",
            "common": "http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v3_0/common",
        }

        # Find all Series elements
        dataset = root.find(".//message:DataSet", namespaces)
        if dataset is None:
            # Try without namespace prefix
            dataset = root.find(".//DataSet")
        if dataset is None:
            # Try with ss namespace
            dataset = root.find(".//ss:DataSet", namespaces)
        if dataset is None:
            raise OpenBBError(

View on GitHub (pinned to 3e071fcc2c)

Solutions

1. Fetch the URL manually (same headers, incl. User-Agent) and inspect what is actually returned.
2. Retry — truncation and transient bad payloads usually resolve.
3. Report to OpenBB if the payload is well-formed XML that this parser rejects, including the URL.

try:
    df = qb.fetch_data(url)
except OpenBBError as e:
    if 'Failed to parse XML' in str(e):
        inspect_raw_response(url, headers=imf_headers())  # see what the server really sent
        time.sleep(5)
        df = qb.fetch_data(url)
    else:
        raise

When it happens

Trigger: api.imf.org returning HTML/text (WAF block page, maintenance notice) with status 200, truncated responses on interrupted connections, or payloads using an encoding defusedxml cannot decode.

Common situations: Corporate proxies rewriting responses, rare server-side serialization bugs, or bot-mitigation pages served to scripted clients.

Understand the failure class

• Parsing and encoding errors: unexpected token, malformed input — why parsers reject input and how to find the real culprit.

Related errors

• Error fetching data: {e}
• Invalid JSON response from ECB
• Unexpected response format. Expected a dictionary, got {type
• {str(e) or 'FRED request failed ({type(e).__name__}).'}
• Failed to fetch data: {response.status}

AI-assisted analysis of OpenBB-finance/OpenBB@3e071fcc2c (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/f9f4f37841e166f8. Report an issue: GitHub.