[and to the list] Hi, Tennis Smith wrote:

I am generating xml files (for test purposes) that will be validated with a schema which uses "xs:sequence". The result is that my docs have to have exactly the right sequence of elements or it will not validate.

Could you say a bit more about your constraints? Why can't you just change the schema, if it's purely for test purposes? And why can't you just look at the schema once and generate the XML documents accordingly?

Its going to be a pain to re-parse the schema file and then use the munged data to sort my xml docs. So, is there some way in lxml I can dump the schema's contents and use that to make sure I have everything in order *before* I try to validate?

No, and I doubt that there's a major use case for that. Validation is about figuring out that something is wrong (any usually also what is wrong), not about getting stuff fixed automatically. Stefan