Duplicate xmlids have way of creeping into my 60,000 documents. The ids keep the document from parsing, which is helpful in drawing attention to errors, but it makes it harder to correct the errors. I work with documents in the TEI namespace, and I have a very kludgy workaround: I comment out the reference to the schema and change ‘xml:id ‘ to ‘xmlom’. Then  I can loop through the document and fix errors with a script.

There must be a more elegant way to do this. Is there away of telling lxml: “never mind the duplicate IDs. Just carry on”. Then I can toggle between a script that cares or doesn’t care about duplicate IDS.

With thanks in advance for any help

Martin Mueller

Professor emeritus of English and Classics

Northwestern University