Ian Bicking wrote:
A first thought is that the document gets pickled, and then the element is an offset in that document.
That's a brilliant idea, but why so complicated? :) pickle: doc = self.getroottree() return (tostring(doc), doc.getpath(self)) unpickle: doc, path = pickle_value return doc.xpath(path) would do the trick. Maybe we should serialise as XML instead of HTML, so that we don't run into any "relaxed parser" problems (I remember a not so old libxml2 HTML serialiser bug with <embed> roundtrips, for example).
There is no return value for __setstate__, and no way to indicate a constructor method for creating instances. That's dumb. I don't like pickle.
:) You don't have to use __[sg]etstate__(). You can define an external function to do it for you, just like objectify does (search src/lxml/lxml.objectify.pyx for "pickle"). The stupid thing is that this function has to be registered /and/ public. It's not enough to register it and delete it afterwards... Still, the problem remains that we need to assure we keep the element lookup context, so this is still not a general solution for lxml.etree. But it should be suitable for lxml.html. Stefan