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This patch allows developers to override the behavior of HTMLParser
when parsing malformed HTML.  Normally HTMLParser calls the function
self.error(), which raises an exception.  This patch adds appropriate
return values for situations where self.error has been redefined in
subclasses to *not* raise an exception.

It does not change the default behavior of HTMLParser and so presents
no backwards compatibility issues.

The patch itself consists of an added comment and two added lines of
code that call 'return' with appropriate values after a self.error call.
Nothing wrong with 'em.  I can't verify that the "junk characters" error
call will leave the parser in a good state, though, if execution returns
from error().

The library documentation could be updated to reflect the ability to 
override
error() behavior; I've written a short patch, available at

http://issola.caltech.edu/~t/transfer/HTMLParser-doc-error.patch

More problems exist with markupbase.py, upon which HTMLParser is 
based.
markupbase calls error() as well, and has some stickier situations.  See
comments in bug 917188 as well.

Comments in 683938 and 699079 suggest that raising an exception is the
correct response to the parse errors.  I recommend application of the
patch anyway, because it (a) doesn't change any behavior by default
and (b) may solve some problems for people.

An alternative would be to distinguish between unrecoverable errors
and recoverable errors by having two different functions, e.g. error() 
(for
recoverable errors) and _fail() (for unrecoverable errors).  By default
error() would call _fail() and internal code could be changed to call
_fail() where recovery is impossible.  This might alter behavior in
situations where subclasses override error() but then again that's not
legitimate to do anyway, at least not at the moment -- error() isn't
in the docs ;).

If nothing done, at least close patch 755660 and bug 736428 with a
comment saying that this behavior will not be addressed ;).