diff --git a/frontends/src/jp/cmd_pubsub.py b/frontends/src/jp/cmd_pubsub.py
index e65046e9..7fb27c8b 100644
--- a/frontends/src/jp/cmd_pubsub.py
+++ b/frontends/src/jp/cmd_pubsub.py
@@ -420,11 +420,13 @@ class NodeSchemaEdit(base.CommandBase, common.BaseEdit):
         except ImportError:
             self.disp(u"lxml module must be installed to use edit, please install it with \"pip install lxml\"", error=True)
             self.host.quit(1)
-        parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
-        schema_elt = etree.fromstring(schema, parser)
         content_file_obj, content_file_path = self.getTmpFile()
-        content_file_obj.write(etree.tostring(schema_elt, encoding="utf-8", pretty_print=True))
-        content_file_obj.seek(0)
+        schema = schema.strip()
+        if schema:
+            parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
+            schema_elt = etree.fromstring(schema, parser)
+            content_file_obj.write(etree.tostring(schema_elt, encoding="utf-8", pretty_print=True))
+            content_file_obj.seek(0)
         self.runEditor("pubsub_schema_editor_args", content_file_path, content_file_obj)
 
     def start(self):