Python Rocks! and other rants

Weblog of Kent S Johnson

#72 2006-04-06 15:18:37

lxml for Windows!

lxml now has a Windows binary available. I'm thrilled! lxml is a fast, Pythonic XML library with full XPath support. I don't know of any other Python XML library that has all three of these attributes:

• ElementTree is fast and Pythonic but only supports a limited subset of XPath.
• Amara is Pythonic and supports XPath but in my limited experience it seems quite slow.
• PyXML uses w3c DOM models which are clunky and un-Pythonic.

I have raved many times about dom4j, an XML library for Java which is easy to use and includes XPath support. I have long wished for a Python package as powerful and easy-to-use. I'm optimistic that lxml will fill the bill.

Categories: Python