[lxml-dev] pickling ElementStringResult

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Previously, I'd get a string back and I could stuff that into the ZODB 
> just fine - it was picklable. Now I get this and it can't be pickled, so 
> the same code fails. Is it only xpath that is so affected or are there 
> other operations where these things can be returned?

No, only for XPath results (wherever they occur).


> Another potential problem is that a smart string when held in an object 
> database might keep the underlying XML document alive long past its 
> intended lifetime.
> 
> I was originally thinking about coming up with a special way to pickle 
> these smart strings, but this actually leads me to prefer another 
> solution: a flag that can be passed to xpath() that turns off the 
> returning of smart strings at all.

Wouldn't it be enough to pickle the string subclass as a plain (unicode)
string? You would obviously loose information that way, but pickling the
string result together with the entire tree would be much more surprising IMHO.

Stefan