Stefan, My apologies and thanks - my eyes obviously weren't working so well yesterday! The program's running smoothly now (aside from some "'ascii' codec can't encode character" exceptions that I'm "try/except"ing until I've understood how to handle them with lxml; I realise the docs cover this but I (still) don't quite understand them all yet). Thanks again. Gratefully, Sam 2008/5/25 Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml@behnel.de>:

...

result = etree.XML("content.example.xml", parser) result = etree.parse("thefile.xml", parser)

See the difference?