Features added

See also the features added for lxml 1.0beta (below) to find out more about what's new.

• Element.getiterator() and the findall() methods support finding arbitrary elements 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 Python logging module
• element.getroottree() returns an ElementTree for the root node of the document that contains the element.
• ElementTree.getpath(element) returns a simple, absolute XPath expression to find the element in the tree structure
• Error logs have a last_error attribute for convenience
• Comment texts can be changed through the API

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 the source 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 the error handlers
• lxml.etree compiles much faster
• On libxml2 <= 2.6.22, parsing strings with encoding declaration could fail in certain cases
• Document reference in ElementTree objects was not updated when the root element was moved to a different document
• Running absolute XPath expressions on an Element now evaluates against the root tree
• Evaluating absolute XPath expressions (/*) on an ElementTree could fail
• Crashes when calling XSLT, RelaxNG, etc. with uninitialized ElementTree objects
• Removed public function initThreadLogging(), replaced by more general initThread() 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

Features added

• Formatted output via pretty_print keyword in serialization functions
• XSLT can block access to file system and network via XSLTAccessControl
• ElementTree.write() no longer serializes in memory (reduced memory footprint)
• Speedup of Element.findall(tag) and Element.getiterator(tag)
• Support for writing the XML representation of Elements and ElementTrees to Python unicode strings via etree.tounicode()
• Support for writing XSLT results to Python unicode strings via unicode()
• Parsing a unicode string no longer copies the string (reduced memory footprint)
• Parsing file-like objects reads chunks rather than the whole file (reduced memory footprint)
• Parsing StringIO objects from the start avoids copying the string (reduced memory footprint)
• Read-only 'docinfo' attribute in ElementTree class holds DOCTYPE information, original encoding and XML version as seen by the parser
• etree module can be compiled without libxslt by commenting out the line include "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:id implementation of libxml2 (as opposed to ET compatible XMLID)

Bugs fixed

• 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 passed attrib dictionary
• 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 the ElementTree root node as reference point
• Calling document('') in XSLT failed to return the stylesheet

Features added

• Speedup for Element.makeelement(): the new element 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 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 raises SaxError on mismatch
• lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler 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

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 FunctionNamespace class (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 (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.

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 different ElementTrees at the same time
• document('') works in XSLT documents read from files (in-memory documents cannot support this due to libxslt deficiencies)

Features added

• 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 supported and parsing of gzipped XML files works.
• implemented index() on elements, allowing one to find the index of a SubElement.

Bugs fixed

• 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('') throws XMLSyntaxError instead of a segfault.
• 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 supported libxml2 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 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.

Bugs fixed

• 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() 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, 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.

Features added

• 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.

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!