Python.expat can't parse XML file with bad symbols. How to go around?

I'm trying to parse an XML file (OSM data) with expat, and there are lines 开发者_运维问答with some Unicode characters that expat can't parse:

<tag k="name"
v="абвгдежзиклмнопр�?туфхцчшщьыъ�?ю�?�?БВГДЕЖЗИКЛМ�?ОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЬЫЪЭЮЯ" />

<tag k="name" v="Cin\x8e? Rex" />

(XML file encoding in the opening line is "UTF-8")

The file is quite old, and there must have been errors. In modern files I don't see UTF-8 errors, and they are parsed fine. But what if my program meets a broken symbol, what workaround can I make? Is it possible to join bz2 codec (I parse a compressed file) and utf-8 codec to ignore the broken characters, or change them to "?"?

---

Not sure if '�' characters were introduced by copy-pasting string here, but if you have them in original data, then it seems to be generator problem which introduced \uFFFD charactes as:

"used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode"

citied from: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fffd/index.htm

Workaround? Just idea for extension:

good = True
buf = None
while True:
if good:
        buf = f.read(buf_size)
        else:
        # try again with cleaned buffer
        pass
        try:
            xp.Parse(buf, len(buf) == 0)
            if (len(buf) == 0):
                    break
        good = True
    except ExpatError:
        if xp.ErrorCode  == XML_ERROR_BAD_CHAR_REF:
            # look at ErrorByteIndex (or nearby)
            # for 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD (UTF8 replacement char) and remove it
            good = False
        else:
            # other errors processing
            pass

Or clean input buffer instead + corner cases (partial sequence at the buffer end). I can't recall if python's expat allows to assign custom error handler. That would be easier then.

If i clean yours sample from '�' characters it's processed ok. \xd1 does not fail.

OSM data?