Document is empty

What it means

The parser was handed zero bytes. This is distinct from "Start tag expected", which means something arrived but was not XML; here there was no content whatsoever.

Because the failure is upstream of the document, nothing about the XML itself is at fault. Reading the document will never explain it — the answer is in the response that produced it.

What usually causes it

• An HTTP 204, a 304 handled as a 200, or a body consumed twice before parsing.
• A feed or sitemap endpoint that returns an empty body when it has nothing to publish.
• A file written but never flushed, or read before the writer closed it.
• A gzip-encoded response decoded with the wrong content encoding, yielding nothing.
• A conditional request answered with an empty body because an ETag matched.

How to fix it

• Log the status code and Content-Length alongside the body before parsing, so the empty case is visible.
• Treat an empty body as its own outcome rather than as a parse failure — they need different alerts.
• Check the response was not already read: a stream consumed once is empty the second time.
• For scheduled fetches, retry once; an empty body is frequently transient.

The same error elsewhere

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

• Xerces (Java)

  Premature end of file.

• expat (Python)

  no element found: line 1, column 0

• Go encoding/xml

  EOF

• .NET System.Xml

  Root element is missing.