diff --git a/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/reader.py b/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/reader.py
index eed42bce46..4a828952d8 100644
--- a/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/reader.py
+++ b/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/reader.py
@@ -303,7 +303,12 @@ class MobiReader(object):
self.cleanup_html()
self.log.debug('Parsing HTML...')
- root = html.fromstring(self.processed_html)
+ try:
+ root = html.fromstring(self.processed_html)
+ except:
+ self.log.warning('MOBI markup appears to contain random bytes. Stripping.')
+ self.processed_html = self.remove_random_bytes(self.processed_html)
+ root = html.fromstring(self.processed_html)
if root.xpath('descendant::p/descendant::p'):
from lxml.html import soupparser
self.log.warning('Malformed markup, parsing using BeautifulSoup')
@@ -444,7 +449,10 @@ class MobiReader(object):
self.processed_html = '' + self.processed_html.replace('\n\n', '
') + ''
self.processed_html = self.processed_html.replace('\r\n', '\n')
self.processed_html = self.processed_html.replace('> <', '>\n<')
- self.processed_html = re.sub('\x14|\x15|\x1c|\x1d|\xef|\x12|\x13|\xec', '', self.processed_html)
+
+ def remove_random_bytes(self, html):
+ return re.sub('\x14|\x15|\x1c|\x1d|\xef|\x12|\x13|\xec',
+ '', html)
def ensure_unit(self, raw, unit='px'):
if re.search(r'\d+$', raw) is not None: