I do have to make copies of nodes in an application I'm writing, so I've tried making a patch for lxml to allow me to do that. The patch is attached, but since I don't have experience with Pyrex and libxml2 there could well be something wrong with it. It seems to work, though. Also I don't know if creating a new document / _ElementTree for the new nodes is the right thing to do, but I suppose it should be... Regards Florian Index: src/lxml/etree.pyx =================================================================== --- src/lxml/etree.pyx (revision 12556) +++ src/lxml/etree.pyx (working copy) @@ -370,7 +370,21 @@ c_node = c_node.next else: raise ValueError, "Matching element could not be found" + + def copy(self, recursive = True): + # 1 = copy recursive; 2 = don't copy recursive + recursive = int(not recursive) + 1 + + cdef xmlNode* c_node + cdef xmlDoc* c_doc + c_doc = theParser.newDoc() + etree = _elementTreeFactory(c_doc) + c_node = tree.xmlDocCopyNode(self._c_node, c_doc, recursive) + tree.xmlDocSetRootElement(c_doc, c_node) + + return _elementFactory(etree, c_node) + # PROPERTIES property tag: def __get__(self):