I'm using Ubuntu and I am unable to open a .vtp/.vtu/.vti file that was working previously

FAQ
1

There is a regression in libexpat that makes VTK/ParaView unable to read any XML files.

The error looks like this:

( 279.351s) [paraview        ]       vtkXMLParser.cxx:375    ERR| vtkXMLDataParser (0x594128ee3790): Error parsing XML in stream at line 44, column 89, byte index 3064: not well-formed (invalid token)
( 279.351s) [paraview        ]       vtkXMLReader.cxx:520    ERR| vtkXMLPolyDataReader (0x594128c28ba0): Error parsing input file.  ReadXMLInformation aborting.

The impacted version of libexpat are from 2.6.0 to 2.6.2 and if you installed the paraview package, you may impacted.

Potential fixes are:

  • Use the binary version of ParaView from https://paraview.org/download
  • Upgrade to a more recent version of libexpat
  • Downgrade to an older version of libexpat
2

More info here: vtkXMLDataParser broken by expat (#4) · Issues · Arch Linux / Packaging / Packages / paraview · GitLab