Closing tag has not been opened

What it means

The parser met a closing tag for an element that is not open. Usually the document is a fragment — the opening tags live in another file or another chunk of a stream — or a de-duplication step removed an opening tag and left its close behind.

It is also what you get from splitting a large XML file on line boundaries: each piece after the first begins mid-tree.

What usually causes it

• The input is a fragment, not a whole document.
• A file was split by size or line count rather than at element boundaries.
• A find-and-replace removed an opening tag but not its closing tag.
• Two documents were concatenated and the first was already truncated.

How to fix it

• Wrap a fragment in a single synthetic root element before parsing.
• Split large XML on element boundaries, never on lines or bytes.
• Check whether the first line of the file is where the real document starts.

The same error elsewhere

Different parsers, same defect. If you arrived with one of these messages, you are in the right place.

• libxml2 (PHP, lxml, Nokogiri)

  Extra content at the end of the document

• Xerces (Java)

  Content is not allowed in prolog.

• expat (Python)

  not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, column 4