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

• soupparser.parse() allows passing keyword arguments on to BeautifulSoup.
• fromstring() method in lxml.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 using iterparse() 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 to correctly serialise the value to a string.

Other changes

• lxml.html.ElementSoup was replaced by a new module lxml.html.soupparser with a more consistent API. The old module remains for compatibility with ElementTree's own ElementSoup module.
• Setting the XSLT_CONFIG and XML2_CONFIG environment variables at build time will let setup.py pick up the xml2-config and xslt-config scripts from the supplied path name.
• Passing --with-xml2-config=/path/to/xml2-config to setup.py will override the xml2-config script that is used to determine the C compiler options. The same applies for the --with-xslt-config option.

Features added

• Support passing base_url to file parser functions to override the filename of the file(-like) object.

Bugs fixed

• The prefix for objectify's pytype namespace was missing from the set of 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 (especially lxml.html).
• Add a method argument to lxml.html.tostring() (method="xml" for XHTML output).
• Make it clearer that methods like lxml.html.fromstring() take a base_url argument.

Features added

• Child iteration in lxml.pyclasslookup.
• Loads of new docstrings reflect the signature of functions and methods to make them visible in API docs and help()

Bugs fixed

• The module lxml.html.builder was duplicated as lxml.htmlbuilder
• Form elements would return None for form.fields.keys() if there was an unnamed input field. Now unnamed input fields are completely ignored.
• Setting an element slice in objectify could insert slice-overlapping elements at the wrong position.

Other changes

• The generated API documentation was cleaned up and disburdened from non-public classes etc.
• The previously public module lxml.html.setmixin was renamed to lxml.html._setmixin as it is not an official part of lxml. If you want to use it, feel free to copy it over to your own source base.
• Passing --with-xslt-config=/path/to/xslt-config to setup.py will override the xslt-config script that is used to determine the C compiler options.

Features added

• Passing the unicode type as encoding to tostring() will serialise to unicode. The tounicode() function is now deprecated.
• XMLSchema() and RelaxNG() can parse from StringIO.
• makeparser() function in lxml.objectify to create a new parser with the usual objectify setup.

Bugs fixed

Other changes

Features added

• Plain ASCII XPath string results are no longer forced into unicode objects as in 2.0beta1, but are returned as plain strings as before.
• All XPath string results are 'smart' objects that have a getparent() method to retrieve their parent Element.
• with_tail option in serialiser functions.
• More accurate exception messages in validator creation.

Bugs fixed

• Missing import in lxml.html.clean.
• Some Python 2.4-isms prevented lxml from building/running under Python 2.3.

Other changes

• Exceptions carry only the part of the error log that is related to the operation that caused the error.
• XMLSchema() and RelaxNG() now enforce passing the source file/filename through the file keyword argument.
• The test suite now skips most doctests under Python 2.3.
• make clean no longer removes the .c files (use make realclean instead)

Features added

• Parse-time XML schema validation (schema parser keyword).
• XPath string results of the text() function and attribute selection make their Element container accessible through a getparent() method. As a side-effect, they are now always unicode objects (even ASCII strings).
• XSLT objects are usable in any thread - at the cost of a deep copy if they were not created in that thread.
• Invalid entity names and character references will be rejected by the Entity() factory.
• entity.text returns the textual representation of the entity, e.g. &amp;.

Bugs fixed

• XPath on ElementTrees could crash when selecting the virtual root node of the ElementTree.
• Compilation --without-threading was buggy in alpha5/6.

Other changes

• Minor performance tweaks for Element instantiation and subelement creation

Features added

• New properties position and code on ParseError exception (as in ET 1.3)

Bugs fixed

• Memory leak in the parse() function.
• Minor bugs in XSLT error message formatting.
• Result document memory leak in target parser.

Other changes

• Various places in the XPath, XSLT and iteration APIs now require keyword-only arguments.
• The argument order in element.itersiblings() was changed to match the order used in all other iteration methods. The second argument ('preceding') is now a keyword-only argument.
• The getiterator() method on Elements and ElementTrees was reverted to return an iterator as it did in lxml 1.x. The ET API specification allows it to return either a sequence or an iterator, and it traditionally returned a sequence in ET and an iterator in lxml. However, it is now deprecated in favour of the iter() method, which should be used in new code wherever possible.
• The 'pretty printed' serialisation of ElementTree objects now inserts 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 to lxml.etree.Extension() helper is no longer required, third argument is now a keyword-only argument ns.
• lxml.html.tostring takes an encoding argument.

Features added

• Rich comparison of element.attrib proxies.
• ElementTree compatible TreeBuilder class.
• Use default prefixes for some common XML namespaces.
• lxml.html.clean.Cleaner now allows for a host_whitelist, and two overridable methods: allow_embedded_url(el, url) and the more general allow_element(el).
• Extended slicing of Elements as in element[1:-1:2], both in etree and in objectify
• Resolvers can now provide a base_url keyword argument when resolving a document as string data.
• When using lxml.doctestcompare you can give the doctest option NOPARSE_MARKUP (like # doctest: +NOPARSE_MARKUP) to suppress the special checking for one test.

Bugs fixed

• Target parser failed to report comments.
• In the lxml.html iter_links method, links in <object> tags weren't recognized. (Note: plugin-specific link parameters still aren't recognized.) Also, the <embed> tag, though not standard, is now included in lxml.html.defs.special_inline_tags.
• Using custom resolvers on XSLT stylesheets parsed from a string could request ill-formed URLs.
• With lxml.doctestcompare if you do <tag xmlns="..."> in your output, it will then be namespace-neutral (before the ellipsis was treated as a real namespace).

Other changes

• The module source files were renamed to "lxml.*.pyx", such as "lxml.etree.pyx". This was changed for consistency with the way Pyrex commonly handles package imports. The main effect is that classes now know about their fully qualified class name, including the package name of their module.
• Keyword-only arguments in some API functions, especially in the parsers and serialisers.

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 run gc.collect() in the tearDown() methods. While this makes them take a lot longer to run, it also makes it easier to link a specific test to garbage collection problems that would otherwise appear in later tests.

Features added

Bugs fixed

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

Features added

Bugs fixed

• AttributeError in feed parser on parse errors

Other changes

• Tag name validation in lxml.etree (and lxml.html) now distinguishes between HTML tags and XML tags based on the parser that was used to parse or create them. HTML tags no longer reject any non-ASCII characters in tag names but only spaces and the special characters <>&/"'.

Features added

• Separate feed_error_log property for the feed parser interface. The normal parser interface and iterparse continue to use error_log.
• The normal parsers and the feed parser interface are now separated and can be used concurrently on the same parser instance.
• fromstringlist() and tostringlist() functions as in ElementTree 1.3
• iterparse() accepts an html boolean keyword argument for parsing with the HTML parser (note that this interface may be subject to change)
• Parsers accept an encoding keyword argument that overrides the encoding of the parsed documents.
• New C-API function hasChild() to test for children
• annotate() function in objectify can annotate with Python types and XSI types in one step. Accompanied by xsiannotate() and pyannotate().

Bugs fixed

• XML feed parser setup problem
• Type annotation for unicode strings in DataElement()

Other changes

• 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 by default to prevent loosing type information that is already there.

Features added

• ET.write(), tostring() and tounicode() now accept a keyword argument method that can be one of 'xml' (or None), 'html' or 'text' to serialise as XML, HTML or plain text content.
• iterfind() method on Elements returns an iterator equivalent to findall()
• itertext() method on Elements
• Setting a QName object as value of the .text property or as an attribute will resolve its prefix in the respective context
• ElementTree-like parser target interface as described in http://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm
• ElementTree-like feed parser interface on XMLParser and HTMLParser (feed() and close() methods)

Bugs fixed

• lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements other than the root node of a tree
• Race condition in XSLT where the resolver context leaked between concurrent XSLT calls

Other changes

• element.getiterator() returns a list, use element.iter() to retrieve an iterator (ElementTree 1.3 compatible behaviour)

Features added

• Reimplemented objectify.E for better performance and improved integration with objectify. Provides extended type support based on registered PyTypes.
• XSLT objects now support deep copying
• New makeSubElement() C-API function that allows creating a new subelement 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 first parameter
• HTML tag soup parser based on BeautifulSoup in lxml.html.ElementSoup
• New module lxml.doctestcompare by Ian Bicking for writing simplified doctests based on XML/HTML output. Use by importing lxml.usedoctest or lxml.html.usedoctest from within a doctest.
• New module lxml.cssselect by Ian Bicking for selecting Elements with CSS selectors.
• New package lxml.html written by Ian Bicking for advanced HTML treatment.
• Namespace class setup is now local to the ElementNamespaceClassLookup instance and no longer global.
• Schematron validation (incomplete in libxml2)
• Additional stringify argument to objectify.PyType() takes a conversion function to strings to support setting text values from arbitrary types.
• Entity support through an Entity factory and element classes. XML parsers now have a resolve_entities keyword argument that can be set to False to keep entities in the document.
• column field on error log entries to accompany the line field
• Error specific messages in XPath parsing and evaluation NOTE: for evaluation errors, you will now get an XPathEvalError instead of an XPathSyntaxError. To catch both, you can except on XPathError
• The regular expression functions in XPath now support passing a node-set instead of a string
• Extended type annotation in objectify: new xsiannotate() function
• EXSLT RegExp support in standard XPath (not only XSLT)

Bugs fixed

• 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 XPath evaluators 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

• objectify.PyType for None is now called "NoneType"
• el.getiterator() renamed to el.iter(), following ElementTree 1.3 - original name is still available as alias
• In the public C-API, findOrBuildNodeNs() was replaced by the more generic findOrBuildNodeNsPrefix
• Major refactoring in XPath/XSLT extension function code
• Network access in parsers disabled by default

Features added

• The ElementMaker in lxml.builder now accepts the keyword arguments namespace and nsmap to set a namespace and nsmap for the Elements it creates.
• The docinfo on ElementTree objects has new properties internalDTD and externalDTD that return a DTD object for the internal or external subset of the document respectively.
• Serialising an ElementTree now includes any internal DTD subsets that are part of the document, as well as comments and PIs that are siblings of the root node.

Bugs fixed

• Parsing with the no_network option could fail

Other changes

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

Features added

• ElementTree compatible parser ETCompatXMLParser strips processing instructions and comments while parsing XML
• Parsers now support stripping PIs (keyword argument 'remove_pis')
• etree.fromstring() now supports parsing both HTML and XML, depending on the parser you pass.
• Support base_url keyword argument in HTML() and XML()

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 accept Comment and ProcessingInstruction as tags. It also accepts Element now.

Features added

Bugs fixed

• "deallocating None" crash bug

Features added

• objectify.DataElement now supports setting values from existing data elements (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 in Element.attrib.pop()

Features added

• Module lxml.pyclasslookup module implements an Element class lookup scheme that can access the entire tree in read-only mode to help determining a suitable Element class
• Parsers take a remove_comments keyword argument that skips over comments
• parse() function in objectify, corresponding to XML() etc.
• Element.addnext(el) and Element.addprevious(el) methods to support adding processing instructions and comments around the root node
• Element.attrib was missing clear() and pop() methods
• Extended type annotation in objectify: cleaner annotation namespace setup plus new deannotate() function
• Support for custom Element class instantiation in lxml.sax: passing a makeelement function to the ElementTreeContentHandler will reuse the lookup 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 attribute keys/values/items for a libxml2 node
• DTD validator class (like RelaxNG and XMLSchema)
• HTML generator helpers by Fredrik Lundh in lxml.htmlbuilder
• ElementMaker XML generator by Fredrik Lundh in lxml.builder.E
• Support for pickeling objectify.ObjectifiedElement objects to XML
• update() method on Element.attrib
• Optimised replacement for libxml2's _xmlReconsiliateNs(). This allows lxml a better handling of namespaces when moving elements between documents.

Bugs fixed

• Removing Elements from a tree could make them loose their namespace declarations
• ElementInclude didn't honour base URL of original document
• Replacing the children slice of an Element would cut off the tails of the original children
• Element.getiterator(tag) did not accept Comment and ProcessingInstruction as tags
• API functions now check incoming strings for XML conformity. Zero bytes or low 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 in xsi:type
• More ET compatible behaviour when writing out XML declarations or not
• More robust error handling in iterparse()
• Documents lost their top-level PIs and comments on serialisation
• lxml.sax failed on comments and PIs. Comments are now properly ignored and PIs are copied.
• Possible memory leaks in namespace handling when moving elements between documents

Other changes

• major restructuring in the documentation

Bugs fixed

• Build fixes for MS compiler
• Item assignments to special names like element["text"] failed
• Renamed ObjectifiedDataElement.__setText() to _setText() to make it easier to 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 processing that 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 library runtime search paths has been renamed to --auto-rpath. This makes it possible to pass an --rpath directly to distutils; previously this was being shadowed.

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 thread support in these environments
• Element.find*() did not accept QName objects as path

Other changes

• code cleanup: redundant _NodeBase super class merged into _Element class Note: although the impact should be zero in most cases, this change breaks the 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 not closed/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 reach XSLT.error_log
• Factories objectify.Element() and objectify.DataElement() were missing attrib and nsmap keyword arguments
• Changing the default parser in lxml.objectify did not update the factories Element() and DataElement()
• Let lxml.objectify.Element() always generate tree elements (not data elements)
• 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 lookup schemes should be registered. Namespace lookup is no longer supported by default.
• Support for Python 2.5 beta
• Unlock the GIL for deep copying documents and for XPath()
• New compact keyword argument for parsing read-only documents
• Support for parser options in iterparse()
• The namespace axis is supported in XPath and returns (prefix, URI) tuples
• The XPath expression "/" now returns an empty list instead of raising an exception
• 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 level iterwalk() function as 'iterparse' for trees
• Module level iterparse() function similar to ElementTree (see documentation for differences)
• Element.nsmap property returns a mapping of all namespace prefixes known at the 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 (from parent to parent)
  • Element.itersiblings() iterates over either the following or preceding siblings of an element
  • Element.iterchildren() iterates over the children of an element in either direction
  • All iterators support the tag keyword argument to restrict the generated elements
• Element.getnext() and Element.getprevious() return the direct siblings of an element

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, concurrent XSLT is only allowed when the stylesheet was parsed in the main thread
• The EXSLT regexp:match function now works as defined (except for some differences 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. For performance reasons, only a reference is kept. Resolver updates on the parser will now be reflected by documents that were parsed before the change. Although this should rarely become visible, it is a behavioral change from 1.0.

Features added

• List-like Element.extend() method

Bugs fixed

• Crash in tail handling in Element.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 namespace specific 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 certain cases
• Parsing 8-bit encoded strings from StringIO objects raised an exception
• Module function initThread() 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 the stylesheet 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 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
• 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

• 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
• 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!