2011/10/27 Nico de Groot <ndegroot0@gmail.com>

Hi all,

Thanks for a great library.
While using lxml for webscraping I discovered the following behavior:

import lxml
from StringIO import StringIO
parser = lxml.html.HTMLParser()
to_parse="<html><a><<back</a></html>"
tree = lxml.html.parse(StringIO(to_parse),parser)
print lxml.html.tostring(tree,pretty_print=False,method="html")

results in discarding the text inside the tag 'a':

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

<html><body><a></a></body></html>

and using "<back" inside the <a></a> results in the creating of an non-html tag 'back'

<html><body><a><back></back></a></body></html>

In both cases not what you would want when scraping. Is this a known issue or bug? Is there a way around his?

Nico de Groot

Python : 2.7.1
lxml.etree : (2, 3, 0, 0)
libxml used : (2, 7, 7)
libxml compiled : (2, 7, 7)

libxslt used : (1, 1, 26)
libxslt compiled : (1, 1, 26)

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