[lxml-dev] etree.Element from RNG schema?

[Frank Cusack]

Can lxml give me back an Element object from a parsed RNG schema?
That is, given

  parser = etree.RelaxNG(etree.parse(file("foo.rng")))

I'd like to do something like parser.getroot() in order to get back
an Element/ElementTree which is like the original schema except with
grammar/define's expanded.

What I want is to go from

  <grammar>
    <start>
      <element name="foo">
        <ref name="bar" />
      </element>
    </start>

    <define name="bar">
      <text />
    </define>
  </grammar>

to

  <element name="foo">
    <text />
  </element>

I realize this can't be done in all cases, e.g. there's no way to express
recursive references outside of a <grammar>.  But in that case lxml could
return an error, or simply not recurse (so the expanded element tree would
contain the <ref> itself).

But even without handling recursion, wow it would be valuable for me not
to have to chase down includes and externalRef's, and more so not to have
to [re]implement combine rules.

-frank