Awhile back, I wrote a little script that used ElementTree to parse the XML returned by GetConnectionStackInfo. I posted the 2013sp1 version of the script here.

Anyway, I was a little surprised when I couldn’t get the script to run in 2012 SAP. I was sure that it used to work, but now it was giving me this error:

# ERROR : Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "<Script Block >", line 17, in <module>
#     connections = ET.XML(stackInfo)
#   File "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2012.SAP\Application\python\Lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 962, in XML
#     parser = XMLTreeBuilder()
#   File "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2012.SAP\Application\python\Lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py", line 1118, in __init__
#     "No module named expat; use SimpleXMLTreeBuilder instead"
# ImportError: No module named expat; use SimpleXMLTreeBuilder instead
#  - [line 17]

After digging into the problem a bit, I found that the Softimage install did indeed include expat, but Softimage wasn’t finding it…because I had deleted the Application\python\Lib\sitecustomize.py file!!! Doh.

I had deleted sitecustomize.py while investigating a problem report from a customer, and then I didn’t bother putting it back, because Python was still working in general.

sitecustomize.py adds paths like %XSI_HOME%\Application\python\DLLs to the sys.path, and pyexpat.pyd is in that DLLs folder.