lxml - The Python XML Toolkit April 2008

lxml@python.org

14 participants
27 discussions

[lxml-dev] Reparenting a node
by Lawrence Oluyede 30 Jan '23

30 Jan '23

I have a doc A and a doc B, I'd like to put a node extracted from A in the document B but I always get a ValueError: ValueError: Element is not a child of this node. I didn't find any "setparent" in the API. How can I do this? -- Lawrence, oluyede.org - neropercaso.it "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

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[lxml-dev] lxml has its page on launchpad
by Stefan Behnel 20 Sep '22

20 Sep '22

Hi all, I added the lxml project to launchpad, the Ubuntu Bug-Tracker. It also has a FAQ engine and a couple of other goodies. https://launchpad.net/lxml It's easy to sign up for launchpad, BTW, no 90%-footnotes-contract. Have fun, Stefan

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[lxml-dev] Building LXML Trunk
by Sidnei da Silva 30 Aug '22

30 Aug '22

Hi, I've tried to build lxml from trunk today, on Win32. Got the following error: src\lxml\etree.c(880) : error C2059: syntax error : ')' src\lxml\etree.c(881) : error C2059: syntax error : ')' src\lxml\etree.c(882) : error C2059: syntax error : ')' src\lxml\etree.c(883) : error C2059: syntax error : ')' Any clue? Smells like a Pyrex issue? -- Sidnei da Silva Enfold Systems http://enfoldsystems.com Fax +1 832 201 8856 Office +1 713 942 2377 Ext 214

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[lxml-dev] lxml 2.0 beta1 released
by Stefan Behnel 22 Dec '08

22 Dec '08

Hi all, I finally managed to push lxml 2.0beta1 over to PyPI. This release marks the end of the four month alpha cycle of lxml 2.0. The last stable release series, lxml 1.3, saw the light of day more than six months ago. http://codespeak.net/lxml/dev/ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/2.0beta1 The complete changelog for beta1 and the 2.0 alpha series follows below. Apart from a number of important fixes and enhancements, this beta release also finalises the major API changes that make the difference between 1.x and 2.x. Incompatible changes after this release will require a very good motivation. As usual, compatible enhancements will always be embraced - as will be updates, clarifications and fixes for the documentation! Asking back helps. I expect beta1 to also be the last beta release before lxml 2.0 final (hopefully not in the sense that alpha4/5/6 were), so please test as much as you can to spot any remaining bugs and problems. Note that this release depends on a bug fix in Cython that will hopefully be released as Cython 0.9.6.11 in a couple of days. I attached the necessary patch for those who want work on the sources. Another thing: there was a security advisory on the libxml2 mailing list. To prevent DoS attacks, systems that parse XML from untrusted sources should be updated to libxml2 2.6.31 (or should apply the patch that is referenced in Daniel's post below). http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/2008-January/msg00036.html Sidnei, when you build the Windows binaries, could you please wait for libxml2 2.6.31 to become available as binaries as well? Hopefully, that won't take too long... Have fun, Stefan 2.0beta1 (2008-01-11) ===================== Features added -------------- * Parse-time XML schema validation (``schema`` parser keyword). * XPath string results of the ``text()`` function and attribute selection make their Element container accessible through a ``getparent()`` method. As a side-effect, they are now always unicode objects (even ASCII strings). * ``XSLT`` objects are usable in any thread - at the cost of a deep copy if they were not created in that thread. * Invalid entity names and character references will be rejected by the ``Entity()`` factory. * ``entity.text`` returns the textual representation of the entity, e.g. ``&``. Bugs fixed ---------- * XPath on ElementTrees could crash when selecting the virtual root node of the ElementTree. * Compilation ``--without-threading`` was buggy in alpha5/6. Other changes ------------- * Minor performance tweaks for Element instantiation and subelement creation 2.0alpha6 (2007-12-19) ====================== Features added -------------- * New properties ``position`` and ``code`` on ParseError exception (as in ET 1.3) Bugs fixed ---------- * Memory leak in the ``parse()`` function. * Minor bugs in XSLT error message formatting. * Result document memory leak in target parser. Other changes ------------- * Various places in the XPath, XSLT and iteration APIs now require keyword-only arguments. * The argument order in ``element.itersiblings()`` was changed to match the order used in all other iteration methods. The second argument ('preceding') is now a keyword-only argument. * The ``getiterator()`` method on Elements and ElementTrees was reverted to return an iterator as it did in lxml 1.x. The ET API specification allows it to return either a sequence or an iterator, and it traditionally returned a sequence in ET and an iterator in lxml. However, it is now deprecated in favour of the ``iter()`` method, which should be used in new code wherever possible. * The 'pretty printed' serialisation of ElementTree objects now inserts newlines at the root level between processing instructions, comments and the root tag. * A 'pretty printed' serialisation is now terminated with a newline. * Second argument to ``lxml.etree.Extension()`` helper is no longer required, third argument is now a keyword-only argument ``ns``. * ``lxml.html.tostring`` takes an ``encoding`` argument. 2.0alpha5 (2007-11-24) ====================== Features added -------------- * Rich comparison of ``element.attrib`` proxies. * ElementTree compatible TreeBuilder class. * Use default prefixes for some common XML namespaces. * ``lxml.html.clean.Cleaner`` now allows for a ``host_whitelist``, and two overridable methods: ``allow_embedded_url(el, url)`` and the more general ``allow_element(el)``. * Extended slicing of Elements as in ``element[1:-1:2]``, both in etree and in objectify * Resolvers can now provide a ``base_url`` keyword argument when resolving a document as string data. * When using ``lxml.doctestcompare`` you can give the doctest option ``NOPARSE_MARKUP`` (like ``# doctest: +NOPARSE_MARKUP``) to suppress the special checking for one test. Bugs fixed ---------- * Target parser failed to report comments. * In the ``lxml.html`` ``iter_links`` method, links in ``<object>`` tags weren't recognized. (Note: plugin-specific link parameters still aren't recognized.) Also, the ``<embed>`` tag, though not standard, is now included in ``lxml.html.defs.special_inline_tags``. * Using custom resolvers on XSLT stylesheets parsed from a string could request ill-formed URLs. * With ``lxml.doctestcompare`` if you do ``<tag xmlns="...">`` in your output, it will then be namespace-neutral (before the ellipsis was treated as a real namespace). Other changes ------------- * The module source files were renamed to "lxml.*.pyx", such as "lxml.etree.pyx". This was changed for consistency with the way Pyrex commonly handles package imports. The main effect is that classes now know about their fully qualified class name, including the package name of their module. * Keyword-only arguments in some API functions, especially in the parsers and serialisers. 2.0alpha4 (2007-10-07) ====================== Features added -------------- Bugs fixed ---------- * AttributeError in feed parser on parse errors Other changes ------------- * Tag name validation in lxml.etree (and lxml.html) now distinguishes between HTML tags and XML tags based on the parser that was used to parse or create them. HTML tags no longer reject any non-ASCII characters in tag names but only spaces and the special characters ``<>&/"'``. 2.0alpha3 (2007-09-26) ====================== Features added -------------- * Separate ``feed_error_log`` property for the feed parser interface. The normal parser interface and ``iterparse`` continue to use ``error_log``. * The normal parsers and the feed parser interface are now separated and can be used concurrently on the same parser instance. * ``fromstringlist()`` and ``tostringlist()`` functions as in ElementTree 1.3 * ``iterparse()`` accepts an ``html`` boolean keyword argument for parsing with the HTML parser (note that this interface may be subject to change) * Parsers accept an ``encoding`` keyword argument that overrides the encoding of the parsed documents. * New C-API function ``hasChild()`` to test for children * ``annotate()`` function in objectify can annotate with Python types and XSI types in one step. Accompanied by ``xsiannotate()`` and ``pyannotate()``. Bugs fixed ---------- * XML feed parser setup problem * Type annotation for unicode strings in ``DataElement()`` Other changes ------------- * lxml.etree now emits a warning if you use XPath with libxml2 2.6.27 (which can crash on certain XPath errors) * Type annotation in objectify now preserves the already annotated type by default to prevent loosing type information that is already there. 2.0alpha2 (2007-09-15) ====================== Features added -------------- * ``ET.write()``, ``tostring()`` and ``tounicode()`` now accept a keyword argument ``method`` that can be one of 'xml' (or None), 'html' or 'text' to serialise as XML, HTML or plain text content. * ``iterfind()`` method on Elements returns an iterator equivalent to ``findall()`` * ``itertext()`` method on Elements * Setting a QName object as value of the .text property or as an attribute will resolve its prefix in the respective context * ElementTree-like parser target interface as described in http://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm * ElementTree-like feed parser interface on XMLParser and HTMLParser (``feed()`` and ``close()`` methods) Bugs fixed ---------- * lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements other than the root node of a tree * Race condition in XSLT where the resolver context leaked between concurrent XSLT calls Other changes ------------- * ``element.getiterator()`` returns a list, use ``element.iter()`` to retrieve an iterator (ElementTree 1.3 compatible behaviour) 2.0alpha1 (2007-09-02) ====================== Features added -------------- * Reimplemented ``objectify.E`` for better performance and improved integration with objectify. Provides extended type support based on registered PyTypes. * XSLT objects now support deep copying * New ``makeSubElement()`` C-API function that allows creating a new subelement straight with text, tail and attributes. * XPath extension functions can now access the current context node (``context.context_node``) and use a context dictionary (``context.eval_context``) from the context provided in their first parameter * HTML tag soup parser based on BeautifulSoup in ``lxml.html.ElementSoup`` * New module ``lxml.doctestcompare`` by Ian Bicking for writing simplified doctests based on XML/HTML output. Use by importing ``lxml.usedoctest`` or ``lxml.html.usedoctest`` from within a doctest. * New module ``lxml.cssselect`` by Ian Bicking for selecting Elements with CSS selectors. * New package ``lxml.html`` written by Ian Bicking for advanced HTML treatment. * Namespace class setup is now local to the ``ElementNamespaceClassLookup`` instance and no longer global. * Schematron validation (incomplete in libxml2) * Additional ``stringify`` argument to ``objectify.PyType()`` takes a conversion function to strings to support setting text values from arbitrary types. * Entity support through an ``Entity`` factory and element classes. XML parsers now have a ``resolve_entities`` keyword argument that can be set to False to keep entities in the document. * ``column`` field on error log entries to accompany the ``line`` field * Error specific messages in XPath parsing and evaluation NOTE: for evaluation errors, you will now get an XPathEvalError instead of an XPathSyntaxError. To catch both, you can except on ``XPathError`` * The regular expression functions in XPath now support passing a node-set instead of a string * Extended type annotation in objectify: new ``xsiannotate()`` function * EXSLT RegExp support in standard XPath (not only XSLT) Bugs fixed ---------- * lxml.etree did not check tag/attribute names * The XML parser did not report undefined entities as error * The text in exceptions raised by XML parsers, validators and XPath evaluators now reports the first error that occurred instead of the last * Passing '' as XPath namespace prefix did not raise an error * Thread safety in XPath evaluators Other changes ------------- * objectify.PyType for None is now called "NoneType" * ``el.getiterator()`` renamed to ``el.iter()``, following ElementTree 1.3 - original name is still available as alias * In the public C-API, ``findOrBuildNodeNs()`` was replaced by the more generic ``findOrBuildNodeNsPrefix`` * Major refactoring in XPath/XSLT extension function code * Network access in parsers disabled by default

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[lxml-dev] Pickling objectified trees
by Christian Zagrodnick 09 Jun '08

09 Jun '08

Hi, the other day I had to pickle objectified trees. I just thought to share my findings. Pickling is about serialization. IMHO the natural serialization of an objectified tree is its XML representation. So the following basically does that: -------------------------- import copy_reg import lxml.etree import lxml.objectify def treeFactory(state): """Un-Pickle factory.""" return lxml.objectify.fromstring(state) copy_reg.constructor(treeFactory) def reduceObjectifiedElement(object): """Reduce function for lxml.objectify trees. See http://docs.python.org/lib/pickle-protocol.html for details. """ return (treeFactory, (lxml.etree.tostring(object), )) copy_reg.pickle(lxml.objectify.ObjectifiedElement, reduceObjectifiedElement, treeFactory) ----------------------------------------- You might consider just registering the reduce function in lxml itself. Shouldn't hurt, should it. -- Christian Zagrodnick gocept gmbh & co. kg · forsterstrasse 29 · 06112 halle/saale www.gocept.com · fon. +49 345 12298894 · fax. +49 345 12298891

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[lxml-dev] Help with an error message
by Konstantin Ryabitsev 14 May '08

14 May '08

Hi, everyone: I'm having trouble with the following case. One of my automatic import scripts takes data from one source and submits it to another as an XML feed. Recently, it started failing because one of the entries contains a null. The testcase is such: from lxml.etree import Element sourcestr = 'Contains a null: \x00' unistr = unicode(sourcestr, 'utf-8') elt = Element('foo').text = unistr Running it will cause the following error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "foo.py", line 6, in <module> elt = Element('foo').text = unistr File "etree.pyx", line 741, in etree._Element.text.__set__ File "apihelpers.pxi", line 344, in etree._setNodeText File "apihelpers.pxi", line 648, in etree._utf8 AssertionError: All strings must be XML compatible, either Unicode or ASCII Can someone suggest the best way to deal with this? Kind regards, -- Konstantin Ryabitsev Montréal, Québec

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[lxml-dev] Problem with using the same URI twice in a namespace
by Andreas Degert 26 Apr '08

26 Apr '08

I assume it is legal to have to following namespace declaration/usage: <top xmlns="a" xmlns:a="a" xmlns:b="b"> <foo bar=""/> <b:foobar a:bar=""/> </top> It works when I read such a definition with lxml.etree.parse, but I can't construct it with lxml.etree.Element because then the nsmap dict will be normalized in such a way that each URI occurs only once. Is this a bug in lxml or shouldn't it be used in this way? cheers Andreas

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[lxml-dev] help needed for cleaning up the docs
by Stefan Behnel 25 Apr '08

25 Apr '08

Hi, since Marcin brought this up, I'd like to aggregate some effort for cleaning up the docs in the "doc" directory (ReStructured Text format). http://codespeak.net/svn/lxml/trunk/doc/ For example, I find the current homepage (main.txt) lengthy, unfocused and overwhelming. It only remains usable due to the menu on the left, not by its content itself. There should be a better balance between the amount of content and its accessibility. Maybe the "Changes" section and a part of the "Download" section could go on the installation page, for example. I also find the "Documentation" section too detailed. The list may be fine, but the explanations could be moved to the FAQ entry on documentation, or maybe even a dedicated documentation page. There's also the "APIs specific to lxml.etree" page (api.txt), which continues to be a mess of things that belong nowhere else. It's outdated, badly integrated into the rest of the documentation and overlaps with other docs. The tutorial, for example, has a more extensive section on iteration, and things like the error log should also be handled in the tutorial. Maybe the current api.txt is the right place to start a general "start here" page on documentation? I'm unsure what to do with the "why lxml?" page (intro.txt). I think the content should be there, although it's somewhat dated by now. But I don't feel like it merits its own page (or chapter in the PDF). Maybe a FAQ section would do, although that would be a much less prominent place (and it's not really a FAQ anyway...). Same for the "what's new in 2.0" page (lxml2.txt). Since lxml 2.1 is close, it will soon loose it's front-page topicality. I would be very happy if a couple of people could spare hands and thoughts on this topic. I find accessible documentation very important, and it's something everyone can work on who wants to give something back to the project. Thanks for any help! Stefan

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Re: [lxml-dev] Generating PDF documentation
by Stefan Behnel 24 Apr '08

24 Apr '08

Hi, Marcin Kasperski wrote: >> If there are no >> objection, I'll just add the generated PDF to the source release, that's not >> even 1MB more. > > I'd suggest distributing PDF separately (and linking it from the website > so it is easily available). PDFs aren't compressing too well. The PDF gzips from 900KB down to 600KB, so that's not too much in addition. On the other hand, many people just use easy_install or a buildout to grab the tar.gz, so they won't benefit from the docs at all. We currently have a source distribution of a bit less than 2MB. Most of that is generated HTML documentation (gzipped 1.1MB, mainly the API docs). If we removed everything that easy_install doesn't use, maybe even the test suites, I guess we would be down to some 600KB, including the generated C source. We could still provide a complete tar.gz for download, maybe next to the plain source on PyPI, or just from the lxml homepage. It's harder to do, though, as I don't think distutils supports this without a little setup.py tweaking. Any opinions on this? > And - > especially - some people who do not use source release may find use for > PDF ;-) Sure, I didn't say it wouldn't show up on the web page. Stefan

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Re: [lxml-dev] Generating PDF documentation
by Stefan Behnel 24 Apr '08

24 Apr '08

Stefan Behnel wrote: > Marcin Kasperski wrote: >>> That means we're at 435 pages now. :) >> >> I'd strongly consider publishing two separate PDFs. 435 is a bit too >> much to print and API refs are less useful in print than tutorials and >> design docs. > > True. What about just moving the generated stuff to the end of the PDF? > That way, you can print the file up to page X (somewhere around 200) ... or less, considering that you are most likely not interested in the complete ChangeLog either. I think the best thing to do is to move both the changelog and the API docs into the appendix. That gives us some 170 pages of 'real' documentation, which is visibly separated from the rest. Stefan

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lxml - The Python XML Toolkit April 2008