What are the differences between lxml and ElementTree?
ElementTree comes built-in with the Python standard library which includes other data modules types such as json
and csv
. This means the module ships with each installation of Python. For most normal XML operations including building document trees and simple searching and parsing of element attributes and node values, even namespaces, ElementTree
is a reliable handler.
Lxml is a third-party module that requires installation. In many ways lxml
actually extends ElementTree
as most operations in the built-in module are available. Chief among this extension is that lxml
supports both XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0. Additionally, lxml
can parse HTML documents that are not XML compliant and hence is used for web-scraping operations and even as the parser in BeautifulSoup and engine in Pandas, pandas.read_html()
. Other useful, common features of lxml include pretty_print output, objectify
, and sax
support. Of course too as a third-party module, versions with additional features are readily accessible compared to the standard library.
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Stevoisiak
Active programmer specializing in Python, SQL, C++, Java, and AutoHotkey. My goal is to make technology simpler to use by solving problems before users encounter them. That includes making easy-to-maintain code for anyone I collaborate with. (He/Him)
Updated on June 06, 2022Comments
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Stevoisiak about 2 years
When it comes to generating XML data in Python, there are two libraries I often see recommended: lxml and ElementTree
From what I can tell, the two libraries are very similar to each other. They both seem to have similar module names, usage guidelines, and functionality. Even the import statements are fairly similar.
# Importing lxml and ElementTree import lxml.etree import xml.etree.ElementTree
What are the differences between the
lxml
andElementTree
libraries for Python?