lxml changelog

0.9.2 (2006-05-10)

Speedup for Element.makeelement(): the new element now reuses the original libxml2 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 now accept any Element, not only ElementTrees

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

Error logging API for libxml2 error messages
Various performance improvements
Benchmark script for lxml, ElementTree and cElementTree
Support for registering extension functions through new FunctionNamespace class (see doc/extensions.txt)
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 (see doc/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's parent element.
Python core compatible SAX tree builder and SAX event generator. See doc/sax.txt for more information.

Segfaults and memory leaks in various API functions of Element
Segfault in XSLT.tostring()
ElementTree objects no longer interfere, Elements can be root of different ElementTrees at the same time
document('') now works in XSLT documents read from files (in-memory documents cannot support this due to libxslt deficiencies)

Support for copy.deepcopy() on elements. copy.copy() works also, but does the same thing, and does not create a shallow copy, as that makes no sense in the context of libxml2 trees. This means a potential incompatibility with ElementTree, but there's more chance that it works than if copy.copy() isn't supported at all.
Increased compatibility with (c)ElementTree; .parse() on ElementTree is now supported and parsing of gzipped XML files works.
implemented index() on elements, allowing one to find the index of a SubElement.

Use xslt-config instead of xml2-config to find out libxml2 directories to take into account a case where libxslt is installed in 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 python syntax errors. This should be less confusing.
Fixed error with uncaught exception in Pyrex code.
Calling lxml.etree.fromstring('') now throws XMLSyntaxError instead of a segfault.
has_key() now works on attrib. 'in' tests also work correctly now on attrib.
INSTALL.txt was saying 2.2.16 instead of 2.6.16 as a supported libxml2 version, as it should.
Passing a UTF-8 encoded string to the XML() function would fail; fixed.

parameters (XPath expressions) can now be passed to XSLT using keyword parameters.
Simple XInclude support. Calling the xinclude() method on a tree will process any XInclude statements in the document.
XMLSchema support. Use the XMLSchema class or the convenience xmlschema() method on a tree to do XML Schema (XSD) validation.
Added convenience xslt() method on tree. This is less efficient than the XSLT object, but makes it easier to write quick code.
Added convenience relaxng() method on tree. This is less efficient than the RelaxNG object, but makes it easier to write quick code.
Make it possible to use XPathEvaluator with elements as well. The XPathEvaluator in this case will retain the element so multiple XPath queries can be made against one element efficiently. This replaces the second argument to the .evaluate() method that existed previously.
Allow registerNamespace() to be called on an XPathEvaluator, after creation, 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 to the Element() and SubElement() constructors, which supplies a prefix to namespace URI mapping. This will create namespace prefix declarations on these elements and these prefixes will show up in XML serialization.

Killed yet another memory management related bug: trees created using newDoc would not get a libxml2-level dictionary, which caused problems when deallocating these documents later if they contained a node that came from a document with a dictionary.
Moving namespaced elements between documents was problematic as references to the original document would remain. This has been fixed by applying xmlReconciliateNs() after each move operation.
Can pass None to 'dump()' without segfaults.
tostring() now works properly for non-root elements as well.
Cleaned out the tostring() method so it should handle encoding correctly.
Cleaned out the ElementTree.write() method so it should handle encoding correctly. Writing directly to a file should also be faster now, as there is no need to go through a Python string in that case. Made sure the test cases test both serializing to StringIO as well as serializing to a real file.

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

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!

Python 2.2 compatibility fixes.
unicode fixes in Element() and Comment() as well as XML(); unicode input wasn't properly being UTF-8 encoded.

Initial public release.