diff --git a/docs/scenarios/xml.rst b/docs/scenarios/xml.rst
index 3e01b2f..e1f7b70 100644
--- a/docs/scenarios/xml.rst
+++ b/docs/scenarios/xml.rst
@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ can be loaded into a Python dict like this:
 .. code-block:: python
 
     import xmltodict
-    obj = xmltodict.parse('path/to/file.xml')
+    obj = xmltodict.parse(open('path/to/file.xml'))
 
 and then you can access elements, attributes and values like this: