lxml 2.3.1

Powerful and Pythonic XML processing library combining libxml2/libxslt with the ElementTree API.

lxml is a Pythonic, mature binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries. It provides safe and convenient access to these libraries using the ElementTree API.

It extends the ElementTree API significantly to offer support for XPath, RelaxNG, XML Schema, XSLT, C14N and much more.

To contact the project, go to the project home page or see our bug tracker at https://launchpad.net/lxml

In case you want to use the current in-development version of lxml, you can get it from the github repository at https://github.com/lxml/lxml . Note that this requires Cython to build the sources, see the build instructions on the project home page. To the same end, running easy_install lxml==dev will install lxml from https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tarball/master#egg=lxml-dev if you have an appropriate version of Cython installed.

After an official release of a new stable series, bug fixes may become available at https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tree/lxml-2.3 . Running easy_install lxml==2.3bugfix will install the unreleased branch state from https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tarball/lxml-2.3#egg=lxml-2.3bugfix as soon as a maintenance branch has been established. Note that this requires Cython to be installed at an appropriate version for the build.

2.3.1 (2011-09-25)

Features added

• New option kill_tags in lxml.html.clean to remove specific tags and their content (i.e. their whole subtree).

• pi.get() and pi.attrib on processing instructions to parse pseudo-attributes from the text content of processing instructions.

• lxml.get_include() returns a list of include paths that can be used to compile external C code against lxml.etree. This is specifically required for statically linked lxml builds when code needs to compile against the exact same header file versions as lxml itself.

• Resolver.resolve_file() takes an additional option close_file that configures if the file(-like) object will be closed after reading or not. By default, the file will be closed, as the user is not expected to keep a reference to it.

Bugs fixed

• HTML cleaning didn’t remove ‘data:’ links.

• The html5lib parser integration now uses the ‘official’ implementation in html5lib itself, which makes it work with newer releases of the library.

• In lxml.sax, endElementNS() could incorrectly reject a plain tag name when the corresponding start event inferred the same plain tag name to be in the default namespace.

• When an open file-like object is passed into parse() or iterparse(), the parser will no longer close it after use. This reverts a change in lxml 2.3 where all files would be closed. It is the users responsibility to properly close the file(-like) object, also in error cases.

• Assertion error in lxml.html.cleaner when discarding top-level elements.

• In lxml.cssselect, use the xpath ‘A//B’ (short for ‘A/descendant-or-self::node()/B’) instead of ‘A/descendant::B’ for the css descendant selector (‘A B’). This makes a few edge cases to be consistent with the selector behavior in WebKit and Firefox, and makes more css expressions valid location paths (for use in xsl:template match).

• In lxml.html, non-selected <option> tags no longer show up in the collected form values.

• Adding/removing <option> values to/from a multiple select form field properly selects them and unselects them.

Other changes

• Static builds can specify the download directory with the --download-dir option.