[Python] How to plot data from a .kml file using matplotlib on python 3.7 and Windows 10"?

I will first give a little bit of context to my problem.

I have obtained a .kml file of the territorial seas around the world on this site, and I would like to display it not on Google Earth but on a matplotlib.pyplot plot (with a cartopy map if possible too). The .kml file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2" xmlns:gx="http://www.google.com/kml/ext/2.2" xmlns:kml="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<NetworkLink>
<name>Territorial Seas (12NM) v3</name>
<description><![CDATA[Flanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Territorial Seas (12NM), version 3. Available online at <a href="http://www.marineregions.org">http://www.marineregions.org</a> https://doi.org/10.14284/387. Consulted on YYYY-MM-DD.]]></description>
<Link>
<href>http://geo.vliz.be/geoserver/gwc/service/kml/MarineRegions:eez_12nm.png.kml</href>
</Link>
</NetworkLink>
</kml>


For that I saws on this other StackOverflow question that using fastkml to read the file was possible.

So this is the test.py code I am trying to run (it comes from the usage guide):

from fastkml import kml

filename = "C:\\Users\\dumasal\\Documents\\GOOGLE_EARTH\\MarineRegions-eez_12nm.kml"
with open(filename, 'rt', encoding="utf-8") as myfile:
doc=myfile.read()
print(doc)

# Create the KML object to store the parsed result
k = kml.KML()

# Read in the KML string
k.from_string(doc)
print('k = ', k)

### Next we perform some simple sanity checks ###

# Check that the number of features is correct
# This corresponds to the single ``Document``
features = list(k.features())
print(len(features))

# Check that we can access the features as a generator
# (The two Placemarks of the Document)
print(features[0].features())
f2 = list(features[0].features())
print(len(f2))

# Check specifics of the first Placemark in the Document
print(f2[0])
print(f2[0].description)
print(f2[0].name)

# Check specifics of the second Placemark in the Document
print(f2[1].name)
f2[1].name = "ANOTHER NAME"

# Verify that we can print back out the KML object as a string
print(k.to_string(prettyprint=True))


When I ran it I got the error: ValueError: Unicode strings with encoding declaration are not supported. Please use bytes input or XML fragments without declaration..

I looked the error up on google and found this GitHub page where they were saying that the "from_string()" function only takes bytes so the beginning of my code could be changed to:

from fastkml import kml

filename = "C:\\Users\\dumasal\\Documents\\GOOGLE_EARTH\\MarineRegions-eez_12nm.kml"
with open(filename, 'r') as myfile:
doc=myfile.read().encode('UTF-8')
print(doc)

# Create the KML object to store the parsed result
k = kml.KML()

# Read in the KML string
k.from_string(doc)
print('k = ', k)

### Next we perform some simple sanity checks ###

# Check that the number of features is correct
# This corresponds to the single ``Document``
features = list(k.features())
print(len(features))


And strangely enough the ValueError stopped appearing. However now I get the error:

print(features[0].features())
IndexError: list index out of range


this is because my variables features = [], and I don't know why.

So could you either explain to me why the features variable is empty, or a more direct method to plot a .kml file with python and matplotlib?

Thank you very much!

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