Ответ 1
Просто попробуйте проанализировать его с помощью ElementTree (xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring) - это вызовет ошибку, если XML не сформирован правильно.
>>> a = """<record>
... <player_birthday>1979-09-23</player_birthday>
... <player_name>Orene Ai'i</player_name>
... <player_team>Blues</player_team>
... <player_id>453</player_id>
... <player_height>170</player_height>
... <player_position>F&W</player_position> <---- a '&' here.
... <player_weight>75</player_weight>
... </record>"""
>>>
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
>>> x = ET.fromstring(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1282, in XML
parser.feed(text)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1624, in feed
self._raiseerror(v)
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1488, in _raiseerror
raise err
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 7, column 24