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# Why lxml?

Contents

- Motto
- Aims

# Motto

"the thrills without the strangeness"

To explain the motto:

"Programming with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger. It seems to have the potential to fulfill your wildest dreams, but there's a nagging voice somewhere in your head warning you that you're about to get screwed in the worst way." (a quote by Mark Pilgrim)

Mark Pilgrim was describing in particular the experience a Python programmer has when dealing with libxml2. The default Python bindings of libxml2 are fast, thrilling, powerful, and your code might fail in some horrible way that you really shouldn't have to worry about when writing Python code. lxml combines the power of libxml2 with the ease of use of Python.

# Aims

The C libraries libxml2 and libxslt have huge benefits:

- Standards-compliant XML support.
- Support for (broken) HTML.
- Full-featured.
- Actively maintained by XML experts.
- fast. fast! FAST!

These libraries already ship with Python bindings, but these Python bindings mimic the C-level interface. This yields a number of problems:

- very low level and C-ish (not Pythonic).
- underdocumented and huge, you get lost in them.
- UTF-8 in API, instead of Python unicode strings.
- Can easily cause segfaults from Python.
- Require manual memory management!

lxml is a new Python binding for libxml2 and libxslt, completely independent from these existing Python bindings. Its aims:

- Pythonic API.
- Documented.
- Use Python unicode strings in API.
- Safe (no segfaults).
- No manual memory management!

lxml aims to provide a Pythonic API by following as much as possible the ElementTree API. We're trying to avoid inventing too many new APIs, or you having to learn new things -- XML is complicated enough.