[lxml-dev] is tostring() confusing?

[Christian Zagrodnick]

On 2007-06-08 19:09:30 +0200, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> said:

> Having tostring() as a function and not a method seems a bit odd to me. 
>   I know it's from ElementTree, but at least for HTML it's awkward -- 
> using lxml.etree.tostring on HTML is almost certain to create bad 
> output; the output won't be real XHTML (lacking namespaces and it'll 
> probably be invalid), and it will parse quite badly as HTML (<script 
> src="..."/> for instance will typically break the entire page in a 
> browser).
> 
> When I was first using ElementTree, I remember being a bit baffled by 
> the lack of a serializing method.  I then found tostring and kind of 
> forgot about it, but as I copy tostring methods around (e.g., 
> lxml.html.tostring) it's starting to seem like a problem again.

What I wonder about  is, why str(tree) or unicode(tree) isn't 
supported. I see that str/unicode cannot have arguments (i.e. 
pretty-print, encoding). But still there are suitable defaults, are 
there not.

Regards

-- 
Christian Zagrodnick

gocept gmbh & co. kg  ·  forsterstrasse 29 · 06112 halle/saale
www.gocept.com · fon. +49 345 12298894 · fax. +49 345 12298891