[Python-Dev] Fixing the XML batteries (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Fri Dec 9 19:15:54 CET 2011

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

On Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:02:35 +0100 Stefan Behnel <stefanml at behnel.de> wrote:

> a) The stdlib documentation should help users to choose the right > tool right from the start. > b) cElementTree should finally loose it's "special" status as a > separate library and disappear as an accelerator module behind > ElementTree. +1 and +1. I've done a lot of xml work in Python, and unless you've got a particular reason for wanting to use the dom, ElementTree is the only sane way to go.

I use ElementTree for parsing valid XML, but minidom for producing it.

I think another thing that might go into "refreshing the batteries" is a feature comparison of BeautifulSoup and HTML5lib against the stdlib competition, to see what needs to be added/revised. Having to switch to an outside package for parsing possibly invalid HTML is a pain.

Bill

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list