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class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="credits.html#main-contributors">Main contributors</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="credits.html#special-thanks-goes-to">Special thanks goes to:</a></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="http://lxml.de/sitemap.html">Sitemap</a></li></ul></div><h1 class="title">Parsing XML and HTML with lxml</h1>

lxml provides a very simple and powerful API for parsing XML and HTML. It
supports one-step parsing as well as step-by-step parsing using an
event-driven API (currently only for XML).
<div class="contents topic" id="contents">
Contents
<ul class="simple">
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#parsers" id="id1">Parsers</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#parser-options" id="id2">Parser options</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#error-log" id="id3">Error log</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#parsing-html" id="id4">Parsing HTML</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#doctype-information" id="id5">Doctype information</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#the-target-parser-interface" id="id6">The target parser interface</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#the-feed-parser-interface" id="id7">The feed parser interface</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#iterparse-and-iterwalk" id="id8">iterparse and iterwalk</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#selective-tag-events" id="id9">Selective tag events</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#comments-and-pis" id="id10">Comments and PIs</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#modifying-the-tree" id="id11">Modifying the tree</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#iterwalk" id="id12">iterwalk</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#python-unicode-strings" id="id13">Python unicode strings</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#serialising-to-unicode-strings" id="id14">Serialising to Unicode strings</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
The usual setup procedure:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; from lxml import etree
</pre></div>
<div class="section" id="parsers">
<h1>Parsers</h1>
Parsers are represented by parser objects. There is support for parsing both
XML and (broken) HTML. Note that XHTML is best parsed as XML, parsing it with
the HTML parser can lead to unexpected results. Here is a simple example for
parsing XML from an in-memory string:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; xml = '&lt;a xmlns="test"&gt;&lt;b xmlns="test"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; root = etree.fromstring(xml)
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(root)
b'&lt;a xmlns="test"&gt;&lt;b xmlns="test"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;'
</pre></div>
To read from a file or file-like object, you can use the <tt class="docutils literal">parse()</tt> function,
which returns an <tt class="docutils literal">ElementTree</tt> object:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.parse(StringIO(xml))
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(tree.getroot())
b'&lt;a xmlns="test"&gt;&lt;b xmlns="test"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;'
</pre></div>
Note how the <tt class="docutils literal">parse()</tt> function reads from a file-like object here. If
parsing is done from a real file, it is more common (and also somewhat more
efficient) to pass a filename:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.parse("doc/test.xml")
</pre></div>
lxml can parse from a local file, an HTTP URL or an FTP URL. It also
auto-detects and reads gzip-compressed XML files (.gz).
If you want to parse from memory and still provide a base URL for the document
(e.g. to support relative paths in an XInclude), you can pass the <tt class="docutils literal">base_url</tt>
keyword argument:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; root = etree.fromstring(xml, base_url="http://where.it/is/from.xml")
</pre></div>
<div class="section" id="parser-options">
<h2>Parser options</h2>
The parsers accept a number of setup options as keyword arguments. The above
example is easily extended to clean up namespaces during parsing:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.XMLParser(ns_clean=True)
&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.parse(StringIO(xml), parser)
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(tree.getroot())
b'&lt;a xmlns="test"&gt;&lt;b/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;'
</pre></div>
The keyword arguments in the constructor are mainly based on the libxml2
parser configuration. A DTD will also be loaded if validation or attribute
default values are requested.
Available boolean keyword arguments:
<ul class="simple">
<li>attribute_defaults - read the DTD (if referenced by the document) and add
the default attributes from it</li>
<li>dtd_validation - validate while parsing (if a DTD was referenced)</li>
<li>load_dtd - load and parse the DTD while parsing (no validation is performed)</li>
<li>no_network - prevent network access when looking up external
documents (on by default)</li>
<li>ns_clean - try to clean up redundant namespace declarations</li>
<li>recover - try hard to parse through broken XML</li>
<li>remove_blank_text - discard blank text nodes between tags, also known as
ignorable whitespace. This is best used together with a DTD or schema
(which tells data and noise apart), otherwise a heuristic will be applied.</li>
<li>remove_comments - discard comments</li>
<li>remove_pis - discard processing instructions</li>
<li>strip_cdata - replace CDATA sections by normal text content (on by
default)</li>
<li>resolve_entities - replace entities by their text value (on by
default)</li>
<li>huge_tree - disable security restrictions and support very deep trees
and very long text content (only affects libxml2 2.7+)</li>
<li>compact - use compact storage for short text content (on by default)</li>
</ul>
Other keyword arguments:
<ul class="simple">
<li>encoding - override the document encoding</li>
<li>target - a parser target object that will receive the parse events
(see <a class="reference internal" href="#the-target-parser-interface">The target parser interface</a>)</li>
<li>schema - an XMLSchema to validate against (see <a class="reference external" href="validation.html#xmlschema">validation</a>)</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="section" id="error-log">
<h2>Error log</h2>
Parsers have an <tt class="docutils literal">error_log</tt> property that lists the errors and
warnings of the last parser run:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.XMLParser()
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(len(parser.error_log))
0

&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.XML("&lt;root&gt;\n&lt;/b&gt;", parser)
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Opening and ending tag mismatch: root line 1 and b, line 2, column 5

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(len(parser.error_log))
1

&gt;&gt;&gt; error = parser.error_log[0]
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(error.message)
Opening and ending tag mismatch: root line 1 and b
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(error.line)
2
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(error.column)
5
</pre></div>
Each entry in the log has the following properties:
<ul class="simple">
<li><tt class="docutils literal">message</tt>: the message text</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">domain</tt>: the domain ID (see the lxml.etree.ErrorDomains class)</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">type</tt>: the message type ID (see the lxml.etree.ErrorTypes class)</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">level</tt>: the log level ID (see the lxml.etree.ErrorLevels class)</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">line</tt>: the line at which the message originated (if applicable)</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">column</tt>: the character column at which the message originated (if applicable)</li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">filename</tt>: the name of the file in which the message originated (if applicable)</li>
</ul>
For convenience, there are also three properties that provide readable
names for the ID values:
<ul class="simple">
<li><tt class="docutils literal">domain_name</tt></li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">type_name</tt></li>
<li><tt class="docutils literal">level_name</tt></li>
</ul>
To filter for a specific kind of message, use the different
<tt class="docutils literal">filter_*()</tt> methods on the error log (see the
lxml.etree._ListErrorLog class).
</div>
<div class="section" id="parsing-html">
<h2>Parsing HTML</h2>
HTML parsing is similarly simple. The parsers have a <tt class="docutils literal">recover</tt>
keyword argument that the HTMLParser sets by default. It lets libxml2
try its best to return a valid HTML tree with all content it can
manage to parse. It will not raise an exception on parser errors.
You should use libxml2 version 2.6.21 or newer to take advantage of
this feature.
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; broken_html = "&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;title&gt;test&lt;body&gt;&lt;h1&gt;page title&lt;/h3&gt;"

&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.HTMLParser()
&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.parse(StringIO(broken_html), parser)

&gt;&gt;&gt; result = etree.tostring(tree.getroot(),
... pretty_print=True, method="html")
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result)
&lt;html&gt;
 &lt;head&gt;
 &lt;title&gt;test&lt;/title&gt;
 &lt;/head&gt;
 &lt;body&gt;
 &lt;h1&gt;page title&lt;/h1&gt;
 &lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;
</pre></div>
Lxml has an HTML function, similar to the XML shortcut known from
ElementTree:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; html = etree.HTML(broken_html)
&gt;&gt;&gt; result = etree.tostring(html, pretty_print=True, method="html")
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result)
&lt;html&gt;
 &lt;head&gt;
 &lt;title&gt;test&lt;/title&gt;
 &lt;/head&gt;
 &lt;body&gt;
 &lt;h1&gt;page title&lt;/h1&gt;
 &lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;
</pre></div>
The support for parsing broken HTML depends entirely on libxml2's recovery
algorithm. It is not the fault of lxml if you find documents that are so
heavily broken that the parser cannot handle them. There is also no guarantee
that the resulting tree will contain all data from the original document. The
parser may have to drop seriously broken parts when struggling to keep
parsing. Especially misplaced meta tags can suffer from this, which may lead
to encoding problems.
Note that the result is a valid HTML tree, but it may not be a
well-formed XML tree. For example, XML forbids double hyphens in
comments, which the HTML parser will happily accept in recovery mode.
Therefore, if your goal is to serialise an HTML document as an
XML/XHTML document after parsing, you may have to apply some manual
preprocessing first.
Also note that the HTML parser is meant to parse HTML documents. For
XHTML documents, use the XML parser, which is namespace aware.
</div>
<div class="section" id="doctype-information">
<h2>Doctype information</h2>
The use of the libxml2 parsers makes some additional information available at
the API level. Currently, ElementTree objects can access the DOCTYPE
information provided by a parsed document, as well as the XML version and the
original encoding:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; pub_id = "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
&gt;&gt;&gt; sys_url = "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
&gt;&gt;&gt; doctype_string = '&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "%s" "%s"&gt;' % (pub_id, sys_url)
&gt;&gt;&gt; xml_header = '&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ascii"?&gt;'
&gt;&gt;&gt; xhtml = xml_header + doctype_string + '&lt;html&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.parse(StringIO(xhtml))
&gt;&gt;&gt; docinfo = tree.docinfo
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(docinfo.public_id)
-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(docinfo.system_url)
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd
&gt;&gt;&gt; docinfo.doctype == doctype_string
True

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(docinfo.xml_version)
1.0
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(docinfo.encoding)
ascii
</pre></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="the-target-parser-interface">
<h1>The target parser interface</h1>
<a class="reference external" href="http://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm">As in ElementTree</a>, and similar to a SAX event handler, you can pass
a target object to the parser:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; class EchoTarget:
... def start(self, tag, attrib):
... print("start %s %r" % (tag, dict(attrib)))
... def end(self, tag):
... print("end %s" % tag)
... def data(self, data):
... print("data %r" % data)
... def comment(self, text):
... print("comment %s" % text)
... def close(self):
... print("close")
... return "closed!"

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result)
closed!
</pre></div>
Starting with lxml 2.3, the <tt class="docutils literal">.close()</tt> method will also be called in
the error case. This diverges from the behaviour of ElementTree, but
allows target objects to clean up their state in all situations, so
that the parser can reuse them afterwards.
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; class CollectorTarget:
... def __init__(self):
... self.events = []
... def start(self, tag, attrib):
... self.events.append("start %s %r" % (tag, dict(attrib)))
... def end(self, tag):
... self.events.append("end %s" % tag)
... def data(self, data):
... self.events.append("data %r" % data)
... def comment(self, text):
... self.events.append("comment %s" % text)
... def close(self):
... self.events.append("close")
... return "closed!"

&gt;&gt;&gt; for event in parser.target.events:
... print(event)
start element {}
data u'some'
close
</pre></div>
Note that the parser does not build a tree when using a parser
target. The result of the parser run is whatever the target object
returns from its <tt class="docutils literal">.close()</tt> method. If you want to return an XML
tree here, you have to create it programmatically in the target
object. An example for a parser target that builds a tree is the
<tt class="docutils literal">TreeBuilder</tt>:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.XMLParser(target = etree.TreeBuilder())

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result.tag)
element
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result[0].text)
comment
</pre></div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="the-feed-parser-interface">
<h1>The feed parser interface</h1>
Since lxml 2.0, the parsers have a feed parser interface that is
compatible to the <a class="reference external" href="http://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm">ElementTree parsers</a>. You can use it to feed data
into the parser in a controlled step-by-step way.
In lxml.etree, you can use both interfaces to a parser at the same
time: the <tt class="docutils literal">parse()</tt> or <tt class="docutils literal">XML()</tt> functions, and the feed parser
interface. Both are independent and will not conflict (except if used
in conjunction with a parser target object as described above).
To start parsing with a feed parser, just call its <tt class="docutils literal">feed()</tt> method
to feed it some data.
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.XMLParser()

&gt;&gt;&gt; for data in ('&lt;?xml versio', 'n="1.0"?', '&gt;&lt;roo', 't&gt;&lt;a', '/&gt;&lt;/root&gt;'):
... parser.feed(data)
</pre></div>
When you are done parsing, you must call the <tt class="docutils literal">close()</tt> method to
retrieve the root Element of the parse result document, and to unlock the
parser:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; root = parser.close()

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(root.tag)
root
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(root[0].tag)
a
</pre></div>
If you do not call <tt class="docutils literal">close()</tt>, the parser will stay locked and
subsequent feeds will keep appending data, usually resulting in a non
well-formed document and an unexpected parser error. So make sure you
always close the parser after use, also in the exception case.
Another way of achieving the same step-by-step parsing is by writing your own
file-like object that returns a chunk of data on each <tt class="docutils literal">read()</tt> call. Where
the feed parser interface allows you to actively pass data chunks into the
parser, a file-like object passively responds to <tt class="docutils literal">read()</tt> requests of the
parser itself. Depending on the data source, either way may be more natural.
Note that the feed parser has its own error log called
<tt class="docutils literal">feed_error_log</tt>. Errors in the feed parser do not show up in the
normal <tt class="docutils literal">error_log</tt> and vice versa.
You can also combine the feed parser interface with the target parser:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; parser = etree.XMLParser(target = EchoTarget())

&gt;&gt;&gt; parser.feed("&lt;eleme")
&gt;&gt;&gt; parser.feed("nt&gt;some text&lt;/elem")
start element {}
data u'some text'
&gt;&gt;&gt; parser.feed("ent&gt;")
end element

&gt;&gt;&gt; result = parser.close()
close
&gt;&gt;&gt; print(result)
closed!
</pre></div>
Again, this prevents the automatic creation of an XML tree and leaves
all the event handling to the target object. The <tt class="docutils literal">close()</tt> method
of the parser forwards the return value of the target's <tt class="docutils literal">close()</tt>
method.
</div>
<div class="section" id="iterparse-and-iterwalk">
<h1>iterparse and iterwalk</h1>
As known from ElementTree, the <tt class="docutils literal">iterparse()</tt> utility function
returns an iterator that generates parser events for an XML file (or
file-like object), while building the tree. The values are tuples
<tt class="docutils literal">(event-type, object)</tt>. The event types supported by ElementTree
and lxml.etree are the strings 'start', 'end', 'start-ns' and
'end-ns'.
The 'start' and 'end' events represent opening and closing elements.
They are accompanied by the respective Element instance. By default,
only 'end' events are generated:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; xml = '''\
... &lt;root&gt;
... &lt;element key='value'&gt;text&lt;/element&gt;
... &lt;element&gt;text&lt;/element&gt;tail
... &lt;empty-element xmlns="http://testns/" /&gt;
... &lt;/root&gt;
... '''

&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml))
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
end: element
end: element
end: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: root
</pre></div>
The resulting tree is available through the <tt class="docutils literal">root</tt> property of the iterator:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; context.root.tag
'root'
</pre></div>
The other event types can be activated with the <tt class="docutils literal">events</tt> keyword argument:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; events = ("start", "end")
&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml), events=events)
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
start: root
start: element
end: element
start: element
end: element
start: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: root
</pre></div>
The 'start-ns' and 'end-ns' events notify about namespace
declarations. They do not come with Elements. Instead, the value of
the 'start-ns' event is a tuple <tt class="docutils literal">(prefix, namespaceURI)</tt> that
designates the beginning of a prefix-namespace mapping. The
corresponding <tt class="docutils literal">end-ns</tt> event does not have a value (None). It is
common practice to use a list as namespace stack and pop the last
entry on the 'end-ns' event.
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; print(xml[:-1])
&lt;root&gt;
 &lt;element key='value'&gt;text&lt;/element&gt;
 &lt;element&gt;text&lt;/element&gt;tail
 &lt;empty-element xmlns="http://testns/" /&gt;
&lt;/root&gt;

&gt;&gt;&gt; events = ("start", "end", "start-ns", "end-ns")
&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml), events=events)
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... if action in ('start', 'end'):
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
... elif action == 'start-ns':
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem))
... else:
... print(action)
start: root
start: element
end: element
start: element
end: element
start-ns: ('', 'http://testns/')
start: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: {http://testns/}empty-element
end-ns
end: root
</pre></div>
<div class="section" id="selective-tag-events">
<h2>Selective tag events</h2>
As an extension over ElementTree, lxml.etree accepts a <tt class="docutils literal">tag</tt> keyword
argument just like <tt class="docutils literal">element.iter(tag)</tt>. This restricts events to a
specific tag or namespace:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml), tag="element")
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
end: element
end: element

&gt;&gt;&gt; events = ("start", "end", "comment", "pi")
&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(commented_xml), events=events)
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... if action in ('start', 'end'):
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
... elif action == 'pi':
... print("%s: -%s=%s-" % (action, elem.target, elem.text))
... else: # 'comment'
... print("%s: -%s-" % (action, elem.text))
pi: -some=pi -
comment: - a comment -
start: root
start: element
end: element
comment: - another comment -
start: element
end: element
start: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: {http://testns/}empty-element
end: root

&gt;&gt;&gt; print(context.root.tag)
root
</pre></div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="modifying-the-tree">
<h2>Modifying the tree</h2>
You can modify the element and its descendants when handling the 'end' event.
To save memory, for example, you can remove subtrees that are no longer
needed:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml))
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print(len(elem))
... elem.clear()
0
0
0
3
&gt;&gt;&gt; context.root.getchildren()
[]
</pre></div>
WARNING: During the 'start' event, any content of the element,
such as the descendants, following siblings or text, is not yet
available and should not be accessed. Only attributes are guaranteed
to be set. During the 'end' event, the element and its descendants
can be freely modified, but its following siblings should not be
accessed. During either of the two events, you must not modify or
move the ancestors (parents) of the current element. You should also
avoid moving or discarding the element itself. The golden rule is: do
not touch anything that will have to be touched again by the parser
later on.
If you have elements with a long list of children in your XML file and want to
save more memory during parsing, you can clean up the preceding siblings of
the current element:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; for event, element in etree.iterparse(StringIO(xml)):
... # ... do something with the element
... element.clear() # clean up children
... while element.getprevious() is not None:
... del element.getparent()[0] # clean up preceding siblings
</pre></div>
The <tt class="docutils literal">while</tt> loop deletes multiple siblings in a row. This is only necessary
if you skipped over some of them using the <tt class="docutils literal">tag</tt> keyword argument.
Otherwise, a simple <tt class="docutils literal">if</tt> should do. The more selective your tag is,
however, the more thought you will have to put into finding the right way to
clean up the elements that were skipped. Therefore, it is sometimes easier to
traverse all elements and do the tag selection by hand in the event handler
code.
</div>
<div class="section" id="iterwalk">
<h2>iterwalk</h2>
A second extension over ElementTree is the <tt class="docutils literal">iterwalk()</tt> function. It
behaves exactly like <tt class="docutils literal">iterparse()</tt>, but works on Elements and ElementTrees:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; root = etree.fromstring(xml)
&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterwalk(
... root, events=("start", "end"), tag="element")
&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
start: element
end: element
start: element
end: element

&gt;&gt;&gt; f = StringIO(xml)
&gt;&gt;&gt; context = etree.iterparse(
... f, events=("start", "end"), tag="element")

&gt;&gt;&gt; for action, elem in context:
... print("%s: %s" % (action, elem.tag))
start: element
end: element
start: element
end: element
</pre></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="python-unicode-strings">
<h1>Python unicode strings</h1>
lxml.etree has broader support for Python unicode strings than the ElementTree
library. First of all, where ElementTree would raise an exception, the
parsers in lxml.etree can handle unicode strings straight away. This is most
helpful for XML snippets embedded in source code using the <tt class="docutils literal">XML()</tt>
function:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; root = etree.XML( u'&lt;test&gt; \uf8d1 + \uf8d2 &lt;/test&gt;' )
</pre></div>
This requires, however, that unicode strings do not specify a conflicting
encoding themselves and thus lie about their real encoding:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.XML( u'&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="ASCII"?&gt;\n' +
... u'&lt;test&gt; \uf8d1 + \uf8d2 &lt;/test&gt;' )
Traceback (most recent call last):
 ...
ValueError: Unicode strings with encoding declaration are not supported. Please use bytes input or XML fragments without declaration.
</pre></div>
Similarly, you will get errors when you try the same with HTML data in a
unicode string that specifies a charset in a meta tag of the header. You
should generally avoid converting XML/HTML data to unicode before passing it
into the parsers. It is both slower and error prone.
<div class="section" id="serialising-to-unicode-strings">
<h2>Serialising to Unicode strings</h2>
To serialize the result, you would normally use the <tt class="docutils literal">tostring()</tt>
module function, which serializes to plain ASCII by default or a
number of other byte encodings if asked for:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(root)
b'&lt;test&gt; &amp;#63697; + &amp;#63698; &lt;/test&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(root, encoding='UTF-8', xml_declaration=False)
b'&lt;test&gt; \xef\xa3\x91 + \xef\xa3\x92 &lt;/test&gt;'
</pre></div>
As an extension, lxml.etree recognises the unicode type as an argument to the
encoding parameter to build a Python unicode representation of a tree:
<div class="syntax"><pre>&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(root, encoding=unicode)
u'&lt;test&gt; \uf8d1 + \uf8d2 &lt;/test&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; el = etree.Element("test")
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(el, encoding=unicode)
u'&lt;test/&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; subel = etree.SubElement(el, "subtest")
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(el, encoding=unicode)
u'&lt;test&gt;&lt;subtest/&gt;&lt;/test&gt;'

&gt;&gt;&gt; tree = etree.ElementTree(el)
&gt;&gt;&gt; etree.tostring(tree, encoding=unicode)
u'&lt;test&gt;&lt;subtest/&gt;&lt;/test&gt;'
</pre></div>
The result of <tt class="docutils literal">tostring(encoding=unicode)</tt> can be treated like any
other Python unicode string and then passed back into the parsers.
However, if you want to save the result to a file or pass it over the
network, you should use <tt class="docutils literal">write()</tt> or <tt class="docutils literal">tostring()</tt> with a byte
encoding (typically UTF-8) to serialize the XML. The main reason is
that unicode strings returned by <tt class="docutils literal">tostring(encoding=unicode)</tt> are
not byte streams and they never have an XML declaration to specify
their encoding. These strings are most likely not parsable by other
XML libraries.
For normal byte encodings, the <tt class="docutils literal">tostring()</tt> function automatically
adds a declaration as needed that reflects the encoding of the
returned string. This makes it possible for other parsers to
correctly parse the XML byte stream. Note that using <tt class="docutils literal">tostring()</tt>
with UTF-8 is also considerably faster in most cases.
</div>
</div>
</div>
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