Features added

• New build-time option--with-unicode-strings for Python 2 thatmakes the API always return Unicode strings for names and textinstead of byte strings for plain ASCII content.
• New incremental XML file writing APIetree.xmlfile().
• E factory in lxml.objectify is callable to simplify the creation oftags with non-identifier names without having to resort to getattr().

Bugs fixed

• When starting from a non-namespaced element in lxml.objectify, searchingfor a child without explicitly specifying a namespace incorrectly foundnamespaced elements with the requested local name, instead of restrictingthe search to non-namespaced children.
• GH#85: Deprecation warnings were fixed for Python 3.x.
• GH#33: lxml.html.fromstring() failed to accept bytes input in Py3.
• LP#1080792: Static build of libxml2 2.9.0 failed due to missing file.

Other changes

• The externally useless class_ObjectifyElementMakerCaller wasremoved from the module API of lxml.objectify.
• LP#1075622: lxml.builder is faster for adding text to elements withmany children. Patch by Anders Hammarquist.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Fix crash during interpreter shutdown by switching to Cython 0.17.3 for building.

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• LP#1065924: Element proxies could disappear during garbage collectionin PyPy without proper cleanup.
• GH#71: Failure to work with libxml2 2.6.x.
• LP#1065139: static MacOS-X build failed in Py3.

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• End-of-file handling was incorrect in iterparse() when reading froma low-level C file stream and failed in libxml2 2.9.0 due to itsimproved consistency checks.

Other changes

• The build no longer uses Cython by default unless the generated C filesare missing. To use Cython, pass the option "--with-cython". To ignorethe fatal build error when Cython is required but not available (e.g. torun special setup.py commands that do not actually run a build), pass"--without-cython".

Features added

• Python level access to (optional) libxml2 memory debugging featuresto simplify debugging of memory leaks etc.

Bugs fixed

• Fix a memory leak in XPath by switching to Cython 0.17.1.
• Some tests were adapted to work with PyPy.

Other changes

• The code was adapted to work with the upcoming libxml2 2.9.0 release.

Features added

• The.iter() method of elements now acceptstag arguments like"{*}name" to search for elements with a given local name in anynamespace. With this addition, all combinations of wildcards now workas expected:"{ns}name","{}name","{*}name","{ns}*","{}*"and"{*}*". Note that"name" is equivalent to"{}name",but"*" is"{*}*".The same change applies to the.getiterator(),.itersiblings(),.iterancestors(),.iterdescendants(),.iterchildren()and.itertext() methods;thestrip_attributes(),strip_elements() andstrip_tags() functions as well as theiterparse() class.
• C14N allows specifying the inclusive prefixes to be promotedto top-level during exclusive serialisation.

Bugs fixed

• Passing long Unicode strings into thefeed() parser interfacefailed to read the entire string.

Other changes

Features added

• Initial support for building in PyPy (through cpyext).
• DTD objects gained an API that allows read access to theirdeclarations.
• xpathgrep.py gained support for parsing line-by-line (e.g.from grep output) and for surrounding the output with a new roottag.
• E-factory inlxml.builder accepts subtypes of known datatypes (such as string subtypes) when building elements around them.
• Tree iteration anditerparse() with a selectivetagargument supports passing a set of tags. Tree nodes will bereturned by the iterators if they match any of the tags.

Bugs fixed

• The.find*() methods inlxml.objectify no longer use XPathinternally, which makes them faster in many cases (especially whenshort circuiting after a single or couple of elements) and fixessome behavioural differences compared tolxml.etree. Note thatthis means that they no longer support arbitrary XPath expressionsbut only the subset that theElementPath language supports.The previous implementation was also redundant with the normalXPath support, which can be used as a replacement.
• el.find('*') could accidentally return a comment or processinginstruction that happened to be in the wrong spot. (Same for theother.find*() methods.)
• The error logging is less intrusive and avoids a global setup wherepossible.
• Fixed undefined names in html5lib parser.
• xpathgrep.py did not work in Python 3.
• Element.attrib.update() did not accept anattrib ofanother Element as parameter.
• For subtypes ofElementBase that make the.text or.tailproperties immutable (as in objectify, for example), inserting textwhen creating Elements through the E-Factory feature of the classconstructor would fail with an exception, stating that the textcannot be modified.

Other changes

• The code base was overhauled to properly use 'const' where the APIof libxml2 and libxslt requests it. This also has an impact on thepublic C-API of lxml itself, as defined inetreepublic.pxd, aswell as the provided declarations in thelxml/includes/ directory.Code that uses these declarations may have to be adapted. On theplus side, this fixes several C compiler warnings, also for usercode, thus making it easier to spot real problems again.
• The functionality of "lxml.cssselect" was moved into a separate PyPIpackage called "cssselect". To continue using it, you must installthat package separately. The "lxml.cssselect" module is stillavailable and provides the same interface, provided the "cssselect"package can be imported at runtime.
• Element attributes passed in as anattrib dict or as keywordarguments are now sorted by (namespaced) name before being createdto make their order predictable for serialisation and iteration.Note that adding or deleting attributes afterwards does not takethat order into account, i.e. setting a new attribute appends itafter the existing ones.
• Several classes that are for internal use only were removedfrom thelxml.etree module dict:_InputDocument, _ResolverRegistry, _ResolverContext, _BaseContext,_ExsltRegExp, _IterparseContext, _TempStore, _ExceptionContext,__ContentOnlyElement, _AttribIterator, _NamespaceRegistry,_ClassNamespaceRegistry, _FunctionNamespaceRegistry,_XPathFunctionNamespaceRegistry, _ParserDictionaryContext,_FileReaderContext, _ParserContext, _PythonSaxParserTarget,_TargetParserContext, _ReadOnlyProxy, _ReadOnlyPIProxy,_ReadOnlyEntityProxy, _ReadOnlyElementProxy, _OpaqueNodeWrapper,_OpaqueDocumentWrapper, _ModifyContentOnlyProxy,_ModifyContentOnlyPIProxy, _ModifyContentOnlyEntityProxy,_AppendOnlyElementProxy, _SaxParserContext, _FilelikeWriter,_ParserSchemaValidationContext, _XPathContext,_XSLTResolverContext, _XSLTContext, _XSLTQuotedStringParam
• Several internal classes can no longer be inherited from:_InputDocument, _ResolverRegistry, _ExsltRegExp, _ElementUnicodeResult,_IterparseContext, _TempStore, _AttribIterator, _ClassNamespaceRegistry,_XPathFunctionNamespaceRegistry, _ParserDictionaryContext,_FileReaderContext, _PythonSaxParserTarget, _TargetParserContext,_ReadOnlyPIProxy, _ReadOnlyEntityProxy, _OpaqueDocumentWrapper,_ModifyContentOnlyPIProxy, _ModifyContentOnlyEntityProxy,_AppendOnlyElementProxy, _FilelikeWriter, _ParserSchemaValidationContext,_XPathContext, _XSLTResolverContext, _XSLTContext, _XSLTQuotedStringParam,_XSLTResultTree, _XSLTProcessingInstruction

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Passing long Unicode strings into thefeed() parser interfacefailed to read the entire string.

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Crash when merging text nodes inelement.remove().
• Crash in sax/target parser when reporting empty doctype.

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Crash when building an nsmap (Element property) with emptynamespace URIs.
• Crash due to race condition when errors (or user messages) occurduring threaded XSLT processing.
• XSLT stylesheet compilation could ignore compilation errors.

Other changes

Features added

• lxml.html.tostring() gained new serialisation optionswith_tail anddoctype.

Bugs fixed

• Fixed a crash when usingiterparse() for HTML parsing andrequesting start events.
• Fixed parsing of more selectors in cssselect. Whitespace beforepseudo-elements and pseudo-classes is significant as it is adescendant combinator."E :pseudo" should parse the same as "E *:pseudo", not "E:pseudo".Patch by Simon Sapin.
• lxml.html.diff no longer raises an exception when hitting'img' tags without 'src' attribute.

Other changes

Features added

• lxml.objectify.deannotate() has a new boolean optioncleanup_namespaces to remove the objectify namespacedeclarations (and generally clean up the namespace declarations)after removing the type annotations.
• lxml.objectify gained its ownSubElement() function as acopy ofetree.SubElement to avoid an otherwise redundant importoflxml.etree on the user side.

Bugs fixed

• Fixed the "descendant" bug in cssselect a second time (after a firstfix in lxml 2.3.1). The previous change resulted in a seriousperformance regression for the XPath based evaluation of thetranslated expression. Note that this breaks the usage of some ofthe generated XPath expressions as XSLT location paths thatpreviously worked in 2.3.1.
• Fixed parsing of some selectors in cssselect. Whitespace after combinators">", "+" and "~" is now correctly ignored. Previously is was parsed asa descendant combinator. For example, "div> .foo" was parsed the same as"div>* .foo" instead of "div>.foo". Patch by Simon Sapin.

Other changes

Features added

• New optionkill_tags inlxml.html.clean to remove specifictags and their content (i.e. their whole subtree).
• pi.get() andpi.attrib on processing instructions to parsepseudo-attributes from the text content of processing instructions.
• lxml.get_include() returns a list of include paths that can beused to compile external C code against lxml.etree. This isspecifically required for statically linked lxml builds when codeneeds to compile against the exact same header file versions as lxmlitself.
• Resolver.resolve_file() takes an additional optionclose_file that configures if the file(-like) object will beclosed 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 newerreleases of the library.
• Inlxml.sax,endElementNS() could incorrectly reject a plaintag name when the corresponding start event inferred the same plaintag name to be in the default namespace.
• When an open file-like object is passed intoparse() oriterparse(), the parser will no longer close it after use. Thisreverts a change in lxml 2.3 where all files would be closed. It isthe 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' forthe css descendant selector ('A B'). This makes a few edge caseslike"div*:last-child" consistent with the selector behavior inWebKit and Firefox, and makes more css expressions valid locationpaths (for use in xsl:template match).
• In lxml.html, non-selected<option> tags no longer show up in thecollected form values.
• Adding/removing<option> values to/from a multiple select formfield properly selects them and unselects them.

Other changes

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

Features added

• When looking for children,lxml.objectify takes '{}tag' asmeaning an empty namespace, as opposed to the parent namespace.

Bugs fixed

• When finished reading from a file-like object, the parserimmediately calls its.close() method.
• When finished parsing,iterparse() immediately closes the inputfile.
• Work-around for libxml2 bug that can leave the HTML parser in anon-functional state after parsing a severly broken document (fixedin libxml2 2.7.8).
• marque tag in HTML cleanup code is correctly namedmarquee.

Other changes

• Some public functions in the Cython-level C-API have more explicitreturn types.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Crash in newer libxml2 versions when moving elements betweendocuments that had attributes on replaced XInclude nodes.
• XMLID() function was missing the optionalparser andbase_url parameters.
• Searching for wildcard tags initerparse() was broken in Py3.
• lxml.html.open_in_browser() didn't work in Python 3 due to theuse of os.tempnam. It now takes an optional 'encoding' parameter.

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Crash in XSLT when generating text-only result documents with astylesheet created in a different thread.

Other changes

• repr() of Element objects shows the hex ID with leading 0x(following ElementTree 1.3).

Features added

• Keyword argumentnamespaces inlxml.cssselect.CSSSelector()to pass a prefix-to-namespace mapping for the selector.
• New functionlxml.etree.register_namespace(prefix, uri) thatglobally registers a namespace prefix for a namespace that newlycreated Elements in that namespace will use automatically. FollowsElementTree 1.3.
• Support 'unicode' string name as encoding parameter intostring(), following ElementTree 1.3.
• Support 'c14n' serialisation method inElementTree.write() andtostring(), following ElementTree 1.3.
• The ElementPath expression syntax (el.find*()) was extended tomatch the upcoming ElementTree 1.3 that will ship in the standardlibrary of Python 3.2/2.7. This includes extended support forpredicates as well as namespace prefixes (as known from XPath).
• During regular XPath evaluation, various ESXLT functions areavailable within their namespace when using libxslt 1.1.26 or later.
• Support passing a readily configured logger instance intoPyErrorLog, instead of a logger name.
• On serialisation, the newdoctype parameter can be used tooverride the DOCTYPE (internal subset) of the document.
• New parameteroutput_parent toXSLTExtension.apply_templates()to append the resulting content directly to an output element.
• XSLTExtension.process_children() to process the content of theXSLT extension element itself.
• ISO-Schematron support based on the de-facto Schematron reference'skeleton implementation'.
• XSLT objects now take XPath object as__call__ stylesheetparameters.
• Enable path caching in ElementPath (el.find*()) to avoid parsingoverhead.
• Setting the value of a namespaced attribute always uses a prefixednamespace instead of the default namespace even if both declare thesame namespace URI. This avoids serialisation problems when anattribute from a default namespace is set on an element from adifferent namespace.
• XSLT extension elements: support for XSLT context nodes other thanelements: document root, comments, processing instructions.
• Support for strings (in addition to Elements) in node-sets returnedby extension functions.
• Forms that lack anaction attribute default to the base URL ofthe document on submit.
• XPath attribute result strings have anattrname property.
• Namespace URIs get validated against RFC 3986 at the API level(required by the XML namespace specification).
• Target parsers show their target object in the.target property(compatible with ElementTree).

Bugs fixed

• API is hardened against invalid proxy instances to prevent crashesdue to incorrectly instantiated Element instances.
• Prevent crash when instantiatingCommentBase and friends.
• Export ElementTree compatible XML parser class asXMLTreeBuilder, as it is called in ET 1.2.
• ObjectifiedDataElements in lxml.objectify were not hashable. Theynow use the hash value of the underlying Python value (string,number, etc.) to which they compare equal.
• Parsing broken fragments in lxml.html could fail if the fragmentcontained an orphaned closing '</div>' tag.
• Using XSLT extension elements around the root of the output documentcrashed.
• lxml.cssselect did not distinguish betweenx[attr="val"] andx[attr="val"] (with a space). The latter now matches theattribute independent of the element.
• Rewriting multiple links inside of HTML text content could end upreplacing unrelated content as replacements could impact thereported position of subsequent matches. Modifications are nowsimplified by letting theiterlinks() generator inlxml.htmlreturn links in reversed order if they appear inside the same textnode. Thus, replacements and link-internal modifications no longerchange the position of links reported afterwards.
• The.value attribute oftextarea elements in lxml.html didnot represent the complete raw value (including child tags etc.). Itnow serialises the complete content on read and replaces thecomplete content by a string on write.
• Target parser didn't call.close() on the target object ifparsing failed. Now it is guaranteed that.close() will becalled after parsing, regardless of the outcome.

Other changes

• Official support for Python 3.1.2 and later.
• Static MS Windows builds can now download their dependenciesthemselves.
• Element.attrib no longer uses a cyclic reference back to itsElement object. It therefore no longer requires the garbagecollector to clean up.
• Static builds include libiconv, in addition to libxml2 and libxslt.

Bugs fixed

• Crash in newer libxml2 versions when moving elements betweendocuments that had attributes on replaced XInclude nodes.
• Import fix for urljoin in Python 3.1+.

Bugs fixed

• Crash in XSLT when generating text-only result documents with astylesheet created in a different thread.

Bugs fixed

• Fixed several Python 3 regressions by building with Cython 0.11.3.

Features added

• Support for running XSLT extension elements on the input root node(e.g. in a template matching on "/").

Bugs fixed

• Crash in XPath evaluation when reading smart strings from a documentother than the original context document.
• Support recent versions of html5lib by not requiring itsXHTMLParser inhtmlparser.py anymore.
• Manually instantiating the custom element classes inlxml.objectify could crash.
• Invalid XML text characters were not rejected by the API when theyappeared in unicode strings directly after non-ASCII characters.
• lxml.html.open_http_urllib() did not work in Python 3.
• The functionsstrip_tags() andstrip_elements() inlxml.etree did not remove all occurrences of a tag in all cases.
• Crash in XSLT extension elements when the XSLT context node is notan element.

Bugs fixed

• Static build of libxml2/libxslt was broken.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Theresolve_entities option did not work in the incremental feedparser.
• Looking up and deleting attributes without a namespace could hit anamespaced attribute of the same name instead.
• Late errors during calls toSubElement() (e.g. attribute relatedones) could leave a partially initialised element in the tree.
• Modifying trees that contain parsed entity references could resultin an infinite loop.
• ObjectifiedElement.__setattr__ created an empty-string child element when theattribute value was rejected as a non-unicode/non-ascii string
• Syntax errors inlxml.cssselect could result in misleading errormessages.
• Invalid syntax in CSS expressions could lead to an infinite loop inthe parser oflxml.cssselect.
• CSS special character escapes were not properly handled inlxml.cssselect.
• CSS Unicode escapes were not properly decoded inlxml.cssselect.
• Select options in HTML forms that had no explicitvalueattribute were not handled correctly. The HTML standard dictatesthat their value is defined by their text content. This is nowsupported by lxml.html.
• XPath raised a TypeError when finding CDATA sections. This is nowfully supported.
• Callinghelp(lxml.objectify) didn't work at the prompt.
• TheElementMaker in lxml.objectify no longer defines the defaultnamespaces when annotation is disabled.
• Feed parser failed to honout the 'recover' option on parse errors.
• Diverting the error logging to Python's logging system was broken.

Other changes

Features added

• New helper functionsstrip_attributes(),strip_elements(),strip_tags() in lxml.etree to remove attributes/subtrees/tagsfrom a subtree.

Bugs fixed

• Namespace cleanup on subtree insertions could result in missingnamespace declarations (and potentially crashes) if the elementdefining a namespace was deleted and the namespace was not used bythe top element of the inserted subtree but only in deeper subtrees.
• Raising an exception from a parser target callback didn't alwaysterminate the parser.
• Only {true, false, 1, 0} are accepted as the lexical representation forBoolElement ({True, False, T, F, t, f} not any more), restoring lxml <= 2.0behaviour.

Other changes

Features added

• Injecting default attributes into a document during XML Schemavalidation (also at parse time).
• Passhuge_tree parser option to disable parser securityrestrictions imposed by libxml2 2.7.

Bugs fixed

• The script for statically building libxml2 and libxslt didn't workin Py3.
• XMLSchema() also passes invalid schema documents on to libxml2for parsing (which could lead to a crash before release 2.6.24).

Other changes

Features added

• Support forstandalone flag in XML declaration throughtree.docinfo.standalone and by passingstandalone=True/Falseon serialisation.

Bugs fixed

• Crash when parsing an XML Schema with external imports from afilename.

Features added

• Support strings and instantiable Element classes as child argumentsto the constructor of custom Element classes.
• GZip compression support for serialisation to files and file-likeobjects.

Bugs fixed

• Deep-copying an ElementTree copied neither its sibling PIs andcomments nor its internal/external DTD subsets.
• Soupparser failed on broken attributes without values.
• Crash in XSLT when overwriting an already defined attribute usingxsl:attribute.
• Crash bug in exception handling code under Python 3. This was dueto a problem in Cython, not lxml itself.
• lxml.html.FormElement._name() failed for non top-level forms.
• TAG special attribute in constructor of custom Element classeswas evaluated incorrectly.

Other changes

• Official support for Python 3.0.1.
• Element.findtext() now returns an empty string instead of Nonefor Elements without text content.

Features added

• XSLT.strparam() class method to wrap quoted string parametersthat require escaping.

Bugs fixed

• Memory leak in XPath evaluators.
• Crash when parsing indented XML in one thread and merging it withother documents parsed in another thread.
• Setting thebase attribute inlxml.objectify from a unicodestring failed.
• Fixes following changes in Python 3.0.1.
• Minor fixes for Python 3.

Other changes

• The global error log (which is copied into the exception log) is nowlocal to a thread, which fixes some race conditions.
• More robust error handling on serialisation.

Bugs fixed

• Potential memory leak on exception handling. This was due to aproblem in Cython, not lxml itself.
• iter_links (and related link-rewriting functions) inlxml.html would interpret CSS likeurl("link") incorrectly(treating the quotation marks as part of the link).
• Failing import on systems that have anio module.

Bugs fixed

• Potential memory leak on exception handling. This was due to aproblem in Cython, not lxml itself.
• Failing import on systems that have anio module.

Features added

• Allowlxml.html.diff.htmldiff to accept Element objects, notjust HTML strings.

Bugs fixed

• Crash when using an XPath evaluator in multiple threads.
• Fixed missing whitespace beforeLink:... inlxml.html.diff.

Other changes

• Exportlxml.html.parse.

Bugs fixed

• Crash when using an XPath evaluator in multiple threads.

Bugs fixed

• Crash when using an XPath evaluator in multiple threads.

Features added

• Support for XSLT result tree fragments in XPath/XSLT extensionfunctions.
• QName objects have new propertiesnamespace andlocalname.
• New options for exclusive C14N and C14N without comments.
• Instantiating a custom Element classes creates a new Element.

Bugs fixed

• XSLT didn't inherit the parse options of the input document.
• 0-bytes could slip through the API when used inside of Unicodestrings.
• Withlxml.html.clean.autolink, links with balanced parenthesis,that end in a parenthesis, will be linked in their entirety (typicalwith Wikipedia links).

Other changes

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Ref-count leaks when lxml enters a try-except statement while anoutside exception lives in sys.exc_*(). This was due to a problem inCython, not lxml itself.
• Parser Unicode decoding errors could get swallowed by otherexceptions.
• Name/import errors in some Python modules.
• Internal DTD subsets that did not specify a system or public ID werenot serialised and did not appear in the docinfo property ofElementTrees.
• Fix a pre-Py3k warning when parsing from a gzip file in Py2.6.
• Test suite fixes for libxml2 2.7.
• Resolver.resolve_string() did not work for non-ASCII byte strings.
• Resolver.resolve_file() was broken.
• Overriding the parser encoding didn't work for many encodings.

Other changes

Bugs fixed

• Ref-count leaks when lxml enters a try-except statement while anoutside exception lives in sys.exc_*(). This was due to a problem inCython, not lxml itself.

Features added

• lxml.etree now tries to find the absolute path name of files whenparsing from a file-like object. This helps custom resolvers whenresolving relative URLs, as lixbml2 can prepend them with the pathof the source document.

Bugs fixed

• Memory problem when passing documents between threads.
• Target parser did not honour therecover option and raised anexception instead of calling.close() on the target.

Other changes

Bugs fixed

• Memory problem when passing documents between threads.
• Target parser did not honour therecover option and raised anexception instead of calling.close() on the target.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Crash when parsing XSLT stylesheets in a thread and using them inanother.
• Encoding problem when including text with ElementInclude underPython 3.

Other changes

Features added

• lxml.html.rewrite_links() strips links to work around documentswith whitespace in URL attributes.

Bugs fixed

• Crash when parsing XSLT stylesheets in a thread and using them inanother.
• CSS selector parser dropped remaining expression after a functionwith parameters.

Other changes

Features added

• Smart strings can be switched off in XPath (smart_stringskeyword option).
• lxml.html.rewrite_links() strips links to work around documentswith whitespace in URL attributes.

Bugs fixed

• Custom resolvers were not used for XMLSchema includes/imports andXInclude processing.
• CSS selector parser dropped remaining expression after a functionwith parameters.

Other changes

• objectify.enableRecursiveStr() was removed, useobjectify.enable_recursive_str() instead
• Speed-up when running XSLTs on documents from other threads

Features added

• PicklingElementTree objects in lxml.objectify.

Bugs fixed

• Descending dot-separated classes in CSS selectors were not resolvedcorrectly.
• ElementTree.parse() didn't handle target parser result.
• Potential threading problem in XInclude.
• Crash in Element class lookup classes when the __init__() method ofthe super class is not called from Python subclasses.

Other changes

• Non-ASCII characters in attribute values are no longer escaped onserialisation.

Features added

• Major overhaul oftools/xpathgrep.py script.
• PicklingElementTree objects in lxml.objectify.
• Support for parsing from file-like objects that return unicodestrings.
• New functionetree.cleanup_namespaces(el) that removes unusednamespace declarations from a (sub)tree (experimental).
• XSLT results support the buffer protocol in Python 3.
• Polymorphic functions inlxml.html that accept either a tree ora parsable string will return either a UTF-8 encoded byte string, aunicode string or a tree, based on the type of the input.Previously, the result was always a byte string or a tree.
• Support for Python 2.6 and 3.0 beta.
• File name handling now uses a heuristic to convert between bytestrings (usually filenames) and unicode strings (usually URLs).
• Parsing from a plain file object frees the GIL under Python 2.x.
• Runningiterparse() on a plain file (or filename) frees the GILon reading under Python 2.x.
• Conversion functionshtml_to_xhtml() andxhtml_to_html() inlxml.html (experimental).
• Most features in lxml.html work for XHTML namespaced tag names(experimental).

Bugs fixed

• ElementTree.parse() didn't handle target parser result.
• Crash in Element class lookup classes when the __init__() method ofthe super class is not called from Python subclasses.
• A number of problems related to unicode/byte string conversion offilenames and error messages were fixed.
• Building on MacOS-X now passes the "flat_namespace" option to the Ccompiler, which reportedly prevents build quirks and crashes on thisplatform.
• Windows build was broken.
• Rare crash when serialising to a file object with certain encodings.

Other changes

• Non-ASCII characters in attribute values are no longer escaped onserialisation.
• Passing non-ASCII byte strings or invalid unicode strings as .tag,namespaces, etc. will result in a ValueError instead of anAssertionError (just like the tag well-formedness check).
• Up to several times faster attribute access (i.e. tree traversal) inlxml.objectify.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Incorrect evaluation ofel.find("tag[child]").
• Windows build was broken.
• Moving a subtree from a document created in one thread into adocument of another thread could crash when the rest of the sourcedocument is deleted while the subtree is still in use.
• Rare crash when serialising to a file object with certain encodings.

Other changes

• lxml should now build without problems on MacOS-X.

Features added

• All parse functions in lxml.html take aparser keyword argument.
• lxml.html has a new parser classXHTMLParser and a moduleattributexhtml_parser that provide XML parsers that arepre-configured for the lxml.html package.

Bugs fixed

• Moving a subtree from a document created in one thread into adocument of another thread could crash when the rest of the sourcedocument is deleted while the subtree is still in use.
• Passing an nsmap when creating an Element will no longer stripredundantly defined namespace URIs. This prevented the definitionof more than one prefix for a namespace on the same Element.

Other changes

• If the default namespace is redundantly defined with a prefix on thesame Element, the prefix will now be preferred for subelements andattributes. This allows users to work around a problem in libxml2where attributes from the default namespace could serialise withouta prefix even when they appear on an Element with a differentnamespace (i.e. they would end up in the wrong namespace).

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Resolving to a filename in custom resolvers didn't work.
• lxml did not honour libxslt's second error state "STOPPED", whichlet some XSLT errors pass silently.
• Memory leak in Schematron with libxml2 >= 2.6.31.

Other changes

Features added

• Error logging in Schematron (requires libxml2 2.6.32 or later).
• Parser optionstrip_cdata for normalising or keeping CDATAsections. Defaults toTrue as before, thus replacing CDATAsections by their text content.
• CDATA() factory to wrap string content as CDATA section.

Bugs fixed

• Resolving to a filename in custom resolvers didn't work.
• lxml did not honour libxslt's second error state "STOPPED", whichlet some XSLT errors pass silently.
• Memory leak in Schematron with libxml2 >= 2.6.31.
• lxml.etree accepted non well-formed namespace prefix names.

Other changes

• Major cleanup in internalmoveNodeToDocument() function, whichtakes care of namespace cleanup when moving elements betweendifferent namespace contexts.
• New Elements created through themakeelement() method of an HTMLparser or through lxml.html now end up in a new HTML document(doctype HTML 4.01 Transitional) instead of a generic XML document.This mostly impacts the serialisation and the availability of a DTDcontext.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• Hanging thread in conjunction with GTK threading.
• Crash bug in iterparse when moving elements into other documents.
• HTML elements'.cssselect() method was broken.
• ElementTree.find*() didn't accept QName objects.

Other changes

Features added

• New event types 'comment' and 'pi' initerparse().
• XSLTAccessControl instances have a propertyoptions thatreturns a dict of access configuration options.
• Constant instancesDENY_ALL andDENY_WRITE onXSLTAccessControl class.
• Extension elements for XSLT (experimental!)
• Element.base property returns the xml:base or HTML base URL ofan Element.
• docinfo.URL property is writable.

Bugs fixed

• Default encoding for plain text serialisation was different fromthat of XML serialisation (UTF-8 instead of ASCII).

Other changes

• Minor API speed-ups.
• The benchmark suite now uses tail text in the trees, which makes theabsolute numbers incomparable to previous results.
• Generating the HTML documentation now requiresPygments, which isused to enable syntax highlighting for the doctest examples.

Most long-time deprecated functions and methods were removed:

• etree.clearErrorLog(), useetree.clear_error_log()

• etree.useGlobalPythonLog(), useetree.use_global_python_log()

• etree.ElementClassLookup.setFallback(), useetree.ElementClassLookup.set_fallback()

• etree.getDefaultParser(), useetree.get_default_parser()

• etree.setDefaultParser(), useetree.set_default_parser()

• etree.setElementClassLookup(), useetree.set_element_class_lookup()

  Note thatparser.setElementClassLookup() has not been removedyet, althoughparser.set_element_class_lookup() should be usedinstead.

• xpath_evaluator.registerNamespace(), usexpath_evaluator.register_namespace()

• xpath_evaluator.registerNamespaces(), usexpath_evaluator.register_namespaces()

• objectify.setPytypeAttributeTag, useobjectify.set_pytype_attribute_tag

• objectify.setDefaultParser(), useobjectify.set_default_parser()

Features added

• soupparser.parse() allows passing keyword arguments on toBeautifulSoup.
• fromstring() method inlxml.html.soupparser.

Bugs fixed

• lxml.html.diff didn't treat empty tags properly (e.g.,<br>).
• Handle entity replacements correctly in target parser.
• Crash when usingiterparse() with XML Schema validation.
• The BeautifulSoup parser (soupparser.py) did not replace entities,which made them turn up in text content.
• Attribute assignment of custom PyTypes in objectify could fail tocorrectly serialise the value to a string.

Other changes

• lxml.html.ElementSoup was replaced by a new modulelxml.html.soupparser with a more consistent API. The old moduleremains for compatibility with ElementTree's own ElementSoup module.
• Setting the XSLT_CONFIG and XML2_CONFIG environment variables atbuild time will let setup.py pick up thexml2-config andxslt-config scripts from the supplied path name.
• Passing--with-xml2-config=/path/to/xml2-config to setup.py willoverride thexml2-config script that is used to determine the Ccompiler options. The same applies for the--with-xslt-configoption.

Features added

• Support passingbase_url to file parser functions to overridethe filename of the file(-like) object.

Bugs fixed

• The prefix for objectify's pytype namespace was missing from the setof default prefixes.
• Memory leak in Schematron (fixed only for libxml2 2.6.31+).
• Error type names in RelaxNG were reported incorrectly.
• Slice deletion bug fixed in objectify.

Other changes

• Enabled doctests for some Python modules (especiallylxml.html).
• Add amethod argument tolxml.html.tostring()(method="xml" for XHTML output).
• Make it clearer that methods likelxml.html.fromstring() take abase_url argument.

Features added

• Child iteration inlxml.pyclasslookup.
• Loads of new docstrings reflect the signature of functions andmethods to make them visible in API docs andhelp()

Bugs fixed

• The modulelxml.html.builder was duplicated aslxml.htmlbuilder
• Form elements would return None forform.fields.keys() if therewas an unnamed input field. Now unnamed input fields are completelyignored.
• Setting an element slice in objectify could insert slice-overlappingelements at the wrong position.

Other changes

• The generated API documentation was cleaned up and disburdened fromnon-public classes etc.
• The previously public modulelxml.html.setmixin was renamed tolxml.html._setmixin as it is not an official part of lxml. Ifyou want to use it, feel free to copy it over to your own sourcebase.
• Passing--with-xslt-config=/path/to/xslt-config to setup.py willoverride thexslt-config script that is used to determine the Ccompiler options.

Features added

• Passing theunicode type asencoding totostring() willserialise to unicode. Thetounicode() function is nowdeprecated.
• XMLSchema() andRelaxNG() can parse from StringIO.
• makeparser() function inlxml.objectify to create a newparser with the usual objectify setup.
• Plain ASCII XPath string results are no longer forced into unicodeobjects as in 2.0beta1, but are returned as plain strings as before.
• All XPath string results are 'smart' objects that have agetparent() method to retrieve their parent Element.
• with_tail option in serialiser functions.
• More accurate exception messages in validator creation.
• Parse-time XML schema validation (schema parser keyword).
• XPath string results of thetext() function and attributeselection make their Element container accessible through agetparent() method. As a side-effect, they are now alwaysunicode objects (even ASCII strings).
• XSLT objects are usable in any thread - at the cost of a deepcopy if they were not created in that thread.
• Invalid entity names and character references will be rejected bytheEntity() factory.
• entity.text returns the textual representation of the entity,e.g.&amp;.
• New propertiesposition andcode on ParseError exception (asin ET 1.3)
• Rich comparison ofelement.attrib proxies.
• ElementTree compatible TreeBuilder class.
• Use default prefixes for some common XML namespaces.
• lxml.html.clean.Cleaner now allows for ahost_whitelist, andtwo overridable methods:allow_embedded_url(el, url) and themore generalallow_element(el).
• Extended slicing of Elements as inelement[1:-1:2], both inetree and in objectify
• Resolvers can now provide abase_url keyword argument whenresolving a document as string data.
• When usinglxml.doctestcompare you can give the doctest optionNOPARSE_MARKUP (like# doctest: +NOPARSE_MARKUP) to suppressthe special checking for one test.
• Separatefeed_error_log property for the feed parser interface.The normal parser interface anditerparse continue to useerror_log.
• The normal parsers and the feed parser interface are now separatedand can be used concurrently on the same parser instance.
• fromstringlist() andtostringlist() functions as inElementTree 1.3
• iterparse() accepts anhtml boolean keyword argument forparsing with the HTML parser (note that this interface may besubject to change)
• Parsers accept anencoding keyword argument that overrides the encodingof the parsed documents.
• New C-API functionhasChild() to test for children
• annotate() function in objectify can annotate with Python types and XSItypes in one step. Accompanied byxsiannotate() andpyannotate().
• ET.write(),tostring() andtounicode() now accept a keywordargumentmethod that can be one of 'xml' (or None), 'html' or 'text' toserialise as XML, HTML or plain text content.
• iterfind() method on Elements returns an iterator equivalent tofindall()
• itertext() method on Elements
• Setting a QName object as value of the .text property or as an attributewill resolve its prefix in the respective context
• ElementTree-like parser target interface as described inhttp://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm
• ElementTree-like feed parser interface on XMLParser and HTMLParser(feed() andclose() methods)
• Reimplementedobjectify.E for better performance and improvedintegration with objectify. Provides extended type support based onregistered PyTypes.
• XSLT objects now support deep copying
• NewmakeSubElement() C-API function that allows creating a newsubelement straight with text, tail and attributes.
• XPath extension functions can now access the current context node(context.context_node) and use a context dictionary(context.eval_context) from the context provided in their firstparameter
• HTML tag soup parser based on BeautifulSoup inlxml.html.ElementSoup
• New modulelxml.doctestcompare by Ian Bicking for writing simplifieddoctests based on XML/HTML output. Use by importinglxml.usedoctest orlxml.html.usedoctest from within a doctest.
• New modulelxml.cssselect by Ian Bicking for selecting Elements with CSSselectors.
• New packagelxml.html written by Ian Bicking for advanced HTMLtreatment.
• Namespace class setup is now local to theElementNamespaceClassLookupinstance and no longer global.
• Schematron validation (incomplete in libxml2)
• Additionalstringify argument toobjectify.PyType() takes aconversion function to strings to support setting text values from arbitrarytypes.
• Entity support through anEntity factory and element classes. XMLparsers now have aresolve_entities keyword argument that can be set toFalse to keep entities in the document.
• column field on error log entries to accompany theline field
• Error specific messages in XPath parsing and evaluationNOTE: for evaluation errors, you will now get an XPathEvalError instead ofan XPathSyntaxError. To catch both, you can except onXPathError
• The regular expression functions in XPath now support passing a node-setinstead of a string
• Extended type annotation in objectify: newxsiannotate() function
• EXSLT RegExp support in standard XPath (not only XSLT)

Bugs fixed

• Missing import inlxml.html.clean.
• Some Python 2.4-isms prevented lxml from building/running underPython 2.3.
• XPath on ElementTrees could crash when selecting the virtual rootnode of the ElementTree.
• Compilation--without-threading was buggy in alpha5/6.
• Memory leak in theparse() function.
• Minor bugs in XSLT error message formatting.
• Result document memory leak in target parser.
• Target parser failed to report comments.
• In thelxml.htmliter_links method, links in<object>tags weren't recognized. (Note: plugin-specific link parametersstill aren't recognized.) Also, the<embed> tag, though notstandard, is now included inlxml.html.defs.special_inline_tags.
• Using custom resolvers on XSLT stylesheets parsed from a stringcould request ill-formed URLs.
• Withlxml.doctestcompare if you do<tagxmlns="..."> in youroutput, it will then be namespace-neutral (before the ellipsis wastreated as a real namespace).
• AttributeError in feed parser on parse errors
• XML feed parser setup problem
• Type annotation for unicode strings inDataElement()
• lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements other than theroot node of a tree
• Race condition in XSLT where the resolver context leaked between concurrentXSLT calls
• lxml.etree did not check tag/attribute names
• The XML parser did not report undefined entities as error
• The text in exceptions raised by XML parsers, validators and XPathevaluators now reports the first error that occurred instead of the last
• Passing '' as XPath namespace prefix did not raise an error
• Thread safety in XPath evaluators

Other changes

• Exceptions carry only the part of the error log that is related tothe operation that caused the error.
• XMLSchema() andRelaxNG() now enforce passing the sourcefile/filename through thefile keyword argument.
• The test suite now skips most doctests under Python 2.3.
• make clean no longer removes the .c files (usemakerealclean instead)
• Minor performance tweaks for Element instantiation and subelementcreation
• Various places in the XPath, XSLT and iteration APIs now requirekeyword-only arguments.
• The argument order inelement.itersiblings() was changed tomatch the order used in all other iteration methods. The secondargument ('preceding') is now a keyword-only argument.
• Thegetiterator() method on Elements and ElementTrees wasreverted to return an iterator as it did in lxml 1.x. The ET APIspecification allows it to return either a sequence or an iterator,and it traditionally returned a sequence in ET and an iterator inlxml. However, it is now deprecated in favour of theiter()method, which should be used in new code wherever possible.
• The 'pretty printed' serialisation of ElementTree objects nowinserts newlines at the root level between processing instructions,comments and the root tag.
• A 'pretty printed' serialisation is now terminated with a newline.
• Second argument tolxml.etree.Extension() helper is no longerrequired, third argument is now a keyword-only argumentns.
• lxml.html.tostring takes anencoding argument.
• The module source files were renamed to "lxml.*.pyx", such as"lxml.etree.pyx". This was changed for consistency with the wayPyrex commonly handles package imports. The main effect is thatclasses now know about their fully qualified class name, includingthe package name of their module.
• Keyword-only arguments in some API functions, especially in theparsers and serialisers.
• Tag name validation in lxml.etree (and lxml.html) now distinguishesbetween HTML tags and XML tags based on the parser that was used toparse or create them. HTML tags no longer reject any non-ASCIIcharacters in tag names but only spaces and the special characters<>&/"'.
• lxml.etree now emits a warning if you use XPath with libxml2 2.6.27(which can crash on certain XPath errors)
• Type annotation in objectify now preserves the already annotated type bydefault to prevent loosing type information that is already there.
• element.getiterator() returns a list, useelement.iter() to retrievean iterator (ElementTree 1.3 compatible behaviour)
• objectify.PyType for None is now called "NoneType"
• el.getiterator() renamed toel.iter(), following ElementTree 1.3 -original name is still available as alias
• In the public C-API,findOrBuildNodeNs() was replaced by the moregenericfindOrBuildNodeNsPrefix
• Major refactoring in XPath/XSLT extension function code
• Network access in parsers disabled by default

Bugs fixed

• Backported decref crash fix from 2.0
• Well hidden free-while-in-use crash bug in ObjectPath

Other changes

• The test suites now rungc.collect() in thetearDown()methods. While this makes them take a lot longer to run, it alsomakes it easier to link a specific test to garbage collectionproblems that would otherwise appear in later tests.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• lxml.etree could crash when adding more than 10000 namespaces to adocument
• lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements otherthan the root node of a tree

Features added

• TheElementMaker inlxml.builder now accepts the keyword argumentsnamespace andnsmap to set a namespace and nsmap for the Elements itcreates.
• Thedocinfo on ElementTree objects has new propertiesinternalDTDandexternalDTD that return a DTD object for the internal or externalsubset of the document respectively.
• Serialising an ElementTree now includes any internal DTD subsets that arepart of the document, as well as comments and PIs that are siblings of theroot node.

Bugs fixed

• Parsing with theno_network option could fail

Other changes

• lxml now raises a TagNameWarning about tag names containing ':' instead ofan Error as 1.3.3 did. The reason is that a number of projects currentlymisuse the previous lack of tag name validation to generate namespaceprefixes without declaring namespaces. Apart from the danger of generatingbroken XML this way, it also breaks most of the namespace-aware tools inXML, including XPath, XSLT and validation. lxml 1.3.x will continue tosupport this bug with a Warning, while lxml 2.0 will be strict aboutwell-formed tag names (not only regarding ':').
• Serialising an Element no longer includes its comment and PI siblings (onlyElementTree serialisation includes them).

Features added

• ElementTree compatible parserETCompatXMLParser strips processinginstructions and comments while parsing XML
• Parsers now support stripping PIs (keyword argument 'remove_pis')
• etree.fromstring() now supports parsing both HTML and XML, depending onthe parser you pass.
• Supportbase_url keyword argument inHTML() andXML()

Bugs fixed

• Parsing from Python Unicode strings failed on some platforms
• Element() did not raise an exception on tag names containing ':'
• Element.getiterator(tag) did not acceptComment andProcessingInstruction as tags. It also acceptsElement now.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• "deallocating None" crash bug

Features added

• objectify.DataElement now supports setting values from existing dataelements (not just plain Python types) and reuses defined namespaces etc.
• E-factory support for lxml.objectify (objectify.E)

Bugs fixed

• Better way to prevent crashes in Element proxy cleanup code
• objectify.DataElement didn't set up None value correctly
• objectify.DataElement didn't check the value against the provided type hints
• Reference-counting bug inElement.attrib.pop()

Features added

• Modulelxml.pyclasslookup module implements an Element class lookupscheme that can access the entire tree in read-only mode to help determininga suitable Element class
• Parsers take aremove_comments keyword argument that skips over comments
• parse() function inobjectify, corresponding toXML() etc.
• Element.addnext(el) andElement.addprevious(el) methods to supportadding processing instructions and comments around the root node
• Element.attrib was missingclear() andpop() methods
• Extended type annotation in objectify: cleaner annotation namespace setupplus newdeannotate() function
• Support for custom Element class instantiation in lxml.sax: passing amakeelement function to the ElementTreeContentHandler will reuse thelookup context of that function
• '.' represents empty ObjectPath (identity)
• Element.values() to accompany the existing.keys() and.items()
• collectAttributes() C-function to build a list of attributekeys/values/items for a libxml2 node
• DTD validator class (likeRelaxNG andXMLSchema)
• HTML generator helpers by Fredrik Lundh inlxml.htmlbuilder
• ElementMaker XML generator by Fredrik Lundh inlxml.builder.E
• Support for pickelingobjectify.ObjectifiedElement objects to XML
• update() method on Element.attrib
• Optimised replacement for libxml2's _xmlReconsiliateNs(). This allows lxmla better handling of namespaces when moving elements between documents.

Bugs fixed

• Removing Elements from a tree could make them loose their namespacedeclarations
• ElementInclude didn't honour base URL of original document
• Replacing the children slice of an Element would cut off the tails of theoriginal children
• Element.getiterator(tag) did not acceptComment andProcessingInstruction as tags
• API functions now check incoming strings for XML conformity. Zero bytes orlow ASCII characters are no longer accepted (AssertionError).
• XSLT parsing failed to pass resolver context on to imported documents
• passing '' as namespace prefix in nsmap could be passed through to libxml2
• Objectify couldn't handle prefixed XSD type names inxsi:type
• More ET compatible behaviour when writing out XML declarations or not
• More robust error handling initerparse()
• Documents lost their top-level PIs and comments on serialisation
• lxml.sax failed on comments and PIs. Comments are now properly ignored andPIs are copied.
• Possible memory leaks in namespace handling when moving elements betweendocuments

Other changes

• major restructuring in the documentation

Bugs fixed

• Build fixes for MS compiler
• Item assignments to special names likeelement["text"] failed
• Renamed ObjectifiedDataElement.__setText() to _setText() to make it easierto access
• The pattern for attribute names in ObjectPath was too restrictive

Features added

• Rich comparison of QName objects
• Support for regular expressions in benchmark selection
• get/set emulation (not .attrib!) for attributes on processing instructions
• ElementInclude Python module for ElementTree compatible XInclude processingthat honours custom resolvers registered with the source document
• ElementTree.parser property holds the parser used to parse the document
• setup.py has been refactored for greater readability and flexibility
• --rpath flag to setup.py to induce automatic linking-in of dynamic libraryruntime search paths has been renamed to --auto-rpath. This makes itpossible to pass an --rpath directly to distutils; previously this was beingshadowed.

Bugs fixed

• Element instantiation now uses locks to prevent race conditions with threads
• ElementTree.write() did not raise an exception when the file was not writable
• Error handling could crash under Python <= 2.4.1 - fixed by disabling threadsupport in these environments
• Element.find*() did not accept QName objects as path

Other changes

• code cleanup: redundant _NodeBase super class merged into _Element classNote: although the impact should be zero in most cases, this change breaksthe compatibiliy of the public C-API

Features added

• Data elements in objectify support repr(), which is now used by dump()
• Source distribution now ships with a patched Pyrex
• New C-API function makeElement() to create new elements with text,tail, attributes and namespaces
• Reuse original parser flags for XInclude
• Simplified support for handling XSLT processing instructions

Bugs fixed

• Parser resources were not freed before the next parser run
• Open files and XML strings returned by Python resolvers were notclosed/freed
• Crash in the IDDict returned by XMLDTDID
• Copying Comments and ProcessingInstructions failed
• Memory leak for external URLs in _XSLTProcessingInstruction.parseXSL()
• Memory leak when garbage collecting tailed root elements
• HTML script/style content was not propagated to .text
• Show text xincluded between text nodes correctly in .text and .tail
• 'integer * objectify.StringElement' operation was not supported

Features added

• XSLT profiling support (profile_run keyword)
• countchildren() method on objectify.ObjectifiedElement
• Support custom elements for tree nodes in lxml.objectify

Bugs fixed

• lxml.objectify failed to support long data values (e.g., "123L")
• Error messages from XSLT did not reachXSLT.error_log
• Factories objectify.Element() and objectify.DataElement() were missingattrib andnsmap keyword arguments
• Changing the default parser in lxml.objectify did not update the factoriesElement() and DataElement()
• Let lxml.objectify.Element() always generate tree elements (not dataelements)
• Build under Windows failed ('0' bug in patched Pyrex version)

Features added

• Comments and processing instructions return '<!-- coment -->' and'<?pi-target content?>' for repr()
• Parsers are now the preferred (and default) place where element class lookupschemes should be registered. Namespace lookup is no longer supported bydefault.
• Support for Python 2.5 beta
• Unlock the GIL for deep copying documents and for XPath()
• Newcompact keyword argument for parsing read-only documents
• Support for parser options in iterparse()
• Thenamespace axis is supported in XPath and returns (prefix, URI)tuples
• The XPath expression "/" now returns an empty list instead of raising anexception
• XML-Object API on top of lxml (lxml.objectify)
• Customizable Element class lookup:
  • different pre-implemented lookup mechanisms
  • support for externally provided lookup functions
• Support for processing instructions (ET-like, not compatible)
• Public C-level API for independent extension modules
• Module leveliterwalk() function as 'iterparse' for trees
• Module leveliterparse() function similar to ElementTree (seedocumentation for differences)
• Element.nsmap property returns a mapping of all namespace prefixes known atthe Element to their namespace URI
• Reentrant threading support in RelaxNG, XMLSchema and XSLT
• Threading support in parsers and serializers:
  • All in-memory operations (tostring, parse(StringIO), etc.) free the GIL
  • File operations (on file names) free the GIL
  • Reading from file-like objects frees the GIL and reacquires it for reading
  • Serialisation to file-like objects is single-threaded (high lock overhead)
• Element iteration over XPath axes:
  • Element.iterdescendants() iterates over the descendants of an element
  • Element.iterancestors() iterates over the ancestors of an element (fromparent to parent)
  • Element.itersiblings() iterates over either the following or precedingsiblings of an element
  • Element.iterchildren() iterates over the children of an element in eitherdirection
  • All iterators support thetag keyword argument to restrict thegenerated elements
• Element.getnext() and Element.getprevious() return the direct siblings of anelement

Bugs fixed

• filenames with local 8-bit encoding were not supported
• 1.1beta did not compile under Python 2.3
• ignore unknown 'pyval' attribute values in objectify
• objectify.ObjectifiedElement.addattr() failed to accept Elements and Lists
• objectify.ObjectPath.setattr() failed to accept Elements and Lists
• XPathSyntaxError now inherits from XPathError
• Threading race conditions in RelaxNG and XMLSchema
• Crash when mixing elements from XSLT results into other trees, concurrentXSLT is only allowed when the stylesheet was parsed in the main thread
• The EXSLTregexp:match function now works as defined (except for somedifferences in the regular expression syntax)
• Setting element.text to '' returned None on request, not the empty string
• iterparse() could crash on long XML files
• Creating documents no longer copies the parser for later URL resolving. Forperformance reasons, only a reference is kept. Resolver updates on theparser will now be reflected by documents that were parsed before thechange. Although this should rarely become visible, it is a behavioralchange from 1.0.

Features added

• List-likeElement.extend() method

Bugs fixed

• Crash in tail handling inElement.replace()

Features added

• Element.replace(old, new) method to replace a subelement by another one

Bugs fixed

• Crash when mixing elements from XSLT results into other trees
• Copying/deepcopying did not work for ElementTree objects
• Setting an attribute to a non-string value did not raise an exception
• Element.remove() deleted the tail text from the removed Element

Features added

• Support for setting a custom default Element class as opposed to namespacespecific classes (which still override the default class)

Bugs fixed

• Rare exceptions in Python list functions were not handled
• Parsing accepted unicode strings with XML encoding declaration in certaincases
• Parsing 8-bit encoded strings from StringIO objects raised an exception
• Module functioninitThread() was removed - useless (and never worked)
• XSLT and parser exception messages include the error line number

Features added

• Repeated calls to Element.attrib now efficiently return the same instance

Bugs fixed

• Document deallocation could crash in certain garbage collection scenarios
• Extension function calls in XSLT variable declarations could break thestylesheet and crash on repeated calls
• Deep copying Elements could loose namespaces declared in parents
• Deep copying Elements did not copy tail
• Parsing file(-like) objects failed to load external entities
• Parsing 8-bit strings from file(-like) objects raised an exception
• xsl:include failed when the stylesheet was parsed from a file-like object
• lxml.sax.ElementTreeProducer did not call startDocument() / endDocument()
• MSVC compiler complained about long strings (supports only 2048 bytes)

Features added

• Element.getiterator() and the findall() methods support finding arbitraryelements from a namespace (pattern{namespace}*)
• Another speedup in tree iteration code
• General speedup of Python Element object creation and deallocation
• Writing C14N no longer serializes in memory (reduced memory footprint)
• PyErrorLog for error logging through the Pythonlogging module
• Element.getroottree() returns an ElementTree for the root node of thedocument that contains the element.
• ElementTree.getpath(element) returns a simple, absolute XPath expression tofind the element in the tree structure
• Error logs have alast_error attribute for convenience
• Comment texts can be changed through the API
• Formatted output viapretty_print keyword in serialization functions
• XSLT can block access to file system and network viaXSLTAccessControl
• ElementTree.write() no longer serializes in memory (reduced memoryfootprint)
• Speedup of Element.findall(tag) and Element.getiterator(tag)
• Support for writing the XML representation of Elements and ElementTrees toPython unicode strings viaetree.tounicode()
• Support for writing XSLT results to Python unicode strings viaunicode()
• Parsing a unicode string no longer copies the string (reduced memoryfootprint)
• Parsing file-like objects reads chunks rather than the whole file (reducedmemory footprint)
• Parsing StringIO objects from the start avoids copying the string (reducedmemory footprint)
• Read-only 'docinfo' attribute in ElementTree class holds DOCTYPEinformation, original encoding and XML version as seen by the parser
• etree module can be compiled without libxslt by commenting out the lineinclude "xslt.pxi" near the end of the etree.pyx source file
• Better error messages in parser exceptions
• Error reporting also works in XSLT
• Support for custom document loaders (URI resolvers) in parsers and XSLT,resolvers are registered at parser level
• Implementation of exslt:regexp for XSLT based on the Python 're' module,enabled by default, can be switched off with 'regexp=False' keyword argument
• Support for exslt extensions (libexslt) and libxslt extra functions(node-set, document, write, output)
• Substantial speedup in XPath.evaluate()
• HTMLParser for parsing (broken) HTML
• XMLDTDID function parses XML into tuple (root node, ID dict) based on xml:idimplementation of libxml2 (as opposed to ET compatible XMLID)

Bugs fixed

• Memory leak in Element.__setitem__
• Memory leak in Element.attrib.items() and Element.attrib.values()
• Memory leak in XPath extension functions
• Memory leak in unicode related setup code
• Element now raises ValueError on empty tag names
• Namespace fixing after moving elements between documents could fail if thesource document was freed too early
• Setting namespace-less tag names on namespaced elements ('{ns}t' -> 't')didn't reset the namespace
• Unknown constants from newer libxml2 versions could raise exceptions in theerror handlers
• lxml.etree compiles much faster
• On libxml2 <= 2.6.22, parsing strings with encoding declaration could failin certain cases
• Document reference in ElementTree objects was not updated when the rootelement was moved to a different document
• Running absolute XPath expressions on an Element now evaluates against theroot tree
• Evaluating absolute XPath expressions (/*) on an ElementTree could fail
• Crashes when calling XSLT, RelaxNG, etc. with uninitialized ElementTreeobjects
• Removed public functioninitThreadLogging(), replaced by more generalinitThread() which fixes a number of setup problems in threads
• Memory leak when using iconv encoders in tostring/write
• Deep copying Elements and ElementTrees maintains the document information
• Serialization functions raise LookupError for unknown encodings
• Memory deallocation crash resulting from deep copying elements
• Some ElementTree methods could crash if the root node was not initialized(neither file nor element passed to the constructor)
• Element/SubElement failed to set attribute namespaces from passedattribdictionary
• tostring() adds an XML declaration for non-ASCII encodings
• tostring() failed to serialize encodings that contain 0-bytes
• ElementTree.xpath() and XPathDocumentEvaluator were not using theElementTree root node as reference point
• Callingdocument('') in XSLT failed to return the stylesheet

Features added

• Speedup for Element.makeelement(): the new element reuses the originallibxml2 document instead of creating a new empty one
• Speedup for reversed() iteration over element children (Py2.4+ only)
• ElementTree compatible QName class
• RelaxNG and XMLSchema accept any Element, not only ElementTrees

Bugs fixed

• str(xslt_result) was broken for XSLT output other than UTF-8
• Memory leak if write_c14n fails to write the file after conversion
• Crash in XMLSchema and RelaxNG when passing non-schema documents
• Memory leak in RelaxNG() when RelaxNGParseError is raised

Features added

• lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler checks closing elements and raisesSaxError on mismatch
• lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler supports namespace-less SAX events(startElement, endElement) and defaults to empty attributes (keywordargument)
• Speedup for repeatedly accessing element tag names
• Minor API performance improvements

Bugs fixed

• Memory deallocation bug when using XSLT output method "html"
• sax.py was handling UTF-8 encoded tag names where it shouldn't
• lxml.tests package will no longer be installed (is still in source tar)

Features added

• Error logging API for libxml2 error messages
• Various performance improvements
• Benchmark script for lxml, ElementTree and cElementTree
• Support for registering extension functions through new FunctionNamespaceclass (see doc/extensions.txt)
• ETXPath class for XPath expressions in ElementTree notation ('//{ns}tag')
• Support for variables in XPath expressions (also in XPath class)
• XPath class for compiled XPath expressions
• XMLID module level function (ElementTree compatible)
• XMLParser API for customized libxml2 parser configuration
• Support for custom Element classes through new Namespace API (seedoc/namespace_extensions.txt)
• Common exception base class LxmlError for module exceptions
• real iterator support in iter(Element), Element.getiterator()
• XSLT objects are callable, result trees support str()
• Added MANIFEST.in for easier creation of RPM files.
• 'getparent' method on elements allows navigation to an element'sparent element.
• Python core compatible SAX tree builder and SAX event generator. Seedoc/sax.txt for more information.

Bugs fixed

• Segfaults and memory leaks in various API functions of Element
• Segfault in XSLT.tostring()
• ElementTree objects no longer interfere, Elements can be root of differentElementTrees at the same time
• document('') works in XSLT documents read from files (in-memory documentscannot support this due to libxslt deficiencies)

Features added

• Support for copy.deepcopy() on elements. copy.copy() works also, butdoes the same thing, and doesnot create a shallow copy, as thatmakes no sense in the context of libxml2 trees. This means apotential incompatibility with ElementTree, but there's more chancethat it works than if copy.copy() isn't supported at all.
• Increased compatibility with (c)ElementTree; .parse() on ElementTree issupported and parsing of gzipped XML files works.
• implemented index() on elements, allowing one to find the index of aSubElement.

Bugs fixed

• Use xslt-config instead of xml2-config to find out libxml2directories to take into account a case where libxslt is installedin a different directory than libxslt.
• Eliminate crash condition in iteration when text nodes are changed.
• Passing 'None' to tostring() does not result in a segfault anymore,but an AssertionError.
• Some test fixes for Windows.
• Raise XMLSyntaxError and XPathSyntaxError instead of plain pythonsyntax errors. This should be less confusing.
• Fixed error with uncaught exception in Pyrex code.
• Calling lxml.etree.fromstring('') throws XMLSyntaxError instead of asegfault.
• has_key() works on attrib. 'in' tests also work correctly on attrib.
• INSTALL.txt was saying 2.2.16 instead of 2.6.16 as a supportedlibxml2 version, as it should.
• Passing a UTF-8 encoded string to the XML() function would fail;fixed.

Features added

• parameters (XPath expressions) can be passed to XSLT using keywordparameters.
• Simple XInclude support. Calling the xinclude() method on a treewill process any XInclude statements in the document.
• XMLSchema support. Use the XMLSchema class or the conveniencexmlschema() method on a tree to do XML Schema (XSD) validation.
• Added convenience xslt() method on tree. This is less efficientthan the XSLT object, but makes it easier to write quick code.
• Added convenience relaxng() method on tree. This is less efficientthan the RelaxNG object, but makes it easier to write quick code.
• Make it possible to use XPathEvaluator with elements as well. TheXPathEvaluator in this case will retain the element so multipleXPath queries can be made against one element efficiently. Thisreplaces the second argument to the .evaluate() method that existedpreviously.
• Allow registerNamespace() to be called on an XPathEvaluator, aftercreation, to add additional namespaces. Also allow registerNamespaces(),which does the same for a namespace dictionary.
• Add 'prefix' attribute to element to be able to read prefix information.This is entirely read-only.
• It is possible to supply an extra nsmap keyword parameter tothe Element() and SubElement() constructors, which supplies aprefix to namespace URI mapping. This will create namespaceprefix declarations on these elements and these prefixes will show upin XML serialization.

Bugs fixed

• Killed yet another memory management related bug: trees createdusing newDoc would not get a libxml2-level dictionary, which causedproblems when deallocating these documents later if they contained anode that came from a document with a dictionary.
• Moving namespaced elements between documents was problematic asreferences to the original document would remain. This has been fixedby applying xmlReconciliateNs() after each move operation.
• Can pass None to 'dump()' without segfaults.
• tostring() works properly for non-root elements as well.
• Cleaned out the tostring() method so it should handle encodingcorrectly.
• Cleaned out the ElementTree.write() method so it should handle encodingcorrectly. Writing directly to a file should also be faster, as there is noneed to go through a Python string in that case. Made sure the test casestest both serializing to StringIO as well as serializing to a real file.

Features added

• Changed setup.py so that library_dirs is also guessed. This shouldhelp with compilation on the Mac OS X platform, where otherwise thewrong library (shipping with the OS) could be picked up.
• Tweaked setup.py so that it picks up the version from version.txt.

Bugs fixed

• Do the right thing when handling namespaced attributes.
• fix bug where tostring() moved nodes into new documents. tostring()had very nasty side-effects before this fix, sorry!