lxml

lxml is a Pythonic, mature binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries. It provides safe and convenient access to these libraries using the ElementTree API.

It extends the ElementTree API significantly to offer support for XPath, RelaxNG, XML Schema, XSLT, C14N and much more.

To contact the project, go to the project home page <https://lxml.de/>_ or see our bug tracker at https://launchpad.net/lxml

In case you want to use the current in-development version of lxml, you can get it from the github repository at https://github.com/lxml/lxml . Note that this requires Cython to build the sources, see the build instructions on the project home page.

After an official release of a new stable series, bug fixes may become available at https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tree/lxml-6.0 . Running pip install https://github.com/lxml/lxml/archive/refs/heads/lxml-6.0.tar.gz will install the unreleased branch state as soon as a maintenance branch has been established. Note that this requires Cython to be installed at an appropriate version for the build.

6.0.0 (2025-06-26)

Features added

• GH#463: lxml.html.diff is faster and provides structurally better diffs. Original patch by Steven Fernandez.

• GH#405: The factories Element and ElementTree can now be used in type hints.

• GH#448: Parsing from memoryview and other buffers is supported to allow zero-copy parsing.

• GH#437: lxml.html.builder was missing several HTML5 tag names. Patch by Nick Tarleton.

• GH#458: CDATA can now be written into the incremental xmlfile() writer. Original patch by Lane Shaw.

• A new parser option decompress=False was added that controls the automatic input decompression when using libxml2 2.15.0 or later. Disabling this option by default will effectively prevent decompression bombs when handling untrusted input. Code that depends on automatic decompression must enable this option. Note that libxml2 2.15.0 was not released yet, so this option currently has no effect but can already be used.

• The set of compile time / runtime supported libxml2 feature names is available as etree.LIBXML_COMPILED_FEATURES and etree.LIBXML_FEATURES. This currently includes catalog, ftp, html, http, iconv, icu, lzma, regexp, schematron, xmlschema, xpath, zlib.

Bugs fixed

• GH#353: Predicates in .find*() could mishandle tag indices if a default namespace is provided. Original patch by Luise K.

• GH#272: The head and body properties of lxml.html elements failed if no such element was found. They now return None instead. Original patch by FVolral.

• Tag names provided by code (API, not data) that are longer than INT_MAX could be truncated or mishandled in other ways.

• .text_content() on lxml.html elements accidentally returned a "smart string" without additional information. It now returns a plain string.

• LP#2109931: When building lxml with coverage reporting, it now disables the sys.monitoring support due to the lack of support in https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy/issues/1790

Other changes

• Support for Python < 3.8 was removed.

• Parsing directly from zlib (or lzma) compressed data is now considered an optional feature in lxml. It may get removed from libxml2 at some point for security reasons (compression bombs) and is therefore no longer guaranteed to be available in lxml.

  As of this release, zlib support is still normally available in the binary wheels but may get disabled or removed in later (x.y.0) releases. To test the availability, use "zlib" in etree.LIBXML_FEATURES.

• The Schematron class is deprecated and will become non-functional in a future lxml version. The feature will soon be removed from libxml2 and stop being available.

• GH#438: Wheels include the arm7l target.

• GH#465: Windows wheels include the arm64 target. Patch by Finn Womack.

• Binary wheels use the library versions libxml2 2.14.4 and libxslt 1.1.43. Note that this disables direct HTTP and FTP support for parsing from URLs. Use Python URL request tools instead (which usually also support HTTPS). To test the availability, use "http" in etree.LIBXML_FEATURES.

• Windows binary wheels use the library versions libxml2 2.11.9, libxslt 1.1.39 and libiconv 1.17. They are now based on VS-2022.

• Built using Cython 3.1.2.

• The debug methods MemDebug.dump() and MemDebug.show() were removed completely. libxml2 2.13.0 discarded this feature.