Python Secret Weblog for 2005 January 14

Fri Jan 14 2005 19:15 lxml progress:

Since some people seem to be actually reading this and some progress has been made, I thought I'd give a report of what's been happening with lxml.

• Since last week, I've added a lot more of the ElementTree API, such as the .find() function and friends, by directly using the code from ElementTree.

• I actually am running the ElementTree and cElementTree test suites now. I still need to disable some tests, but a significant fraction is indeed running.

• I've improved the way libxml2's parser functionality gets used, in order to implement libxml2's top-level parse() function.

• I've added XPath support to lxml.etree! An example of what you can do:

  >>> from lxml import etree
  >>> tree = etree.parse('ot.xml')
  >>> tree.xpath('(//v)[5]/text()')
  [u'And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.   
  And the evening and the morning were the first day.\n']
  
  or, say, this, modifying the elements returned:
  
  >>> result = tree.xpath('(//v)[5]')
  >>> result[0].text = 'The day and night verse.'
  >>> tree.xpath('(//v)[5]/text()')
  [u'The day and night verse.']
  

• I've added the start of XSLT support to lxml.etree. An example:

  test.xslt
  
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template match="*" />
    <xsl:template match="/">
      <day><xsl:value-of select="(//v)[5]" /></day>
    </xsl:template>
  </xsl:stylesheet>
  
  >>> from lxml import etree
  >>> style_xml= etree.parse('test.xslt')
  >>> style = etree.XSLT(style_xml)
  >>> ot = etree.parse('ot.xml')
  >>> result = style.apply(ot)
  >>> style.tostring(result)
  u'<?xml version="1.0"?>\n<day>And God called the light Day, and the   
  darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the 
  first day.\n</day>\n'
  >>> result.getroot().tag
  u'day'
  

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