[lxml-dev] eetree.fromsring() returns Element, expected ElementTree

[David Gardner]

Ran into something that maybe a bug, or at least isn't clear from the 
documentation 
[http://codespeak.net/lxml/api/lxml.etree-module.html#fromstring] 
because it doesn't mention a return type for etree.fromstring(). I had 
expected it to behave similar to etree.parse().

Currently I have a work-around of:
tree = etree.ElementTree(etree.fromstring(xml_data))

See below for simple test, and output.

-------
#!/usr/bin/python

import sys,StringIO
from lxml import etree

print "lxml.etree:       ", etree.LXML_VERSION
print "libxml used:      ", etree.LIBXML_VERSION
print "libxml compiled:  ", etree.LIBXML_COMPILED_VERSION
print "libxslt used:     ", etree.LIBXSLT_VERSION
print "libxslt compiled: ", etree.LIBXSLT_COMPILED_VERSION

some_xml_data = "<root>data</root>"

tree1=etree.fromstring(some_xml_data)
tree2=etree.parse(StringIO.StringIO(some_xml_data))

print type(tree1)
print type(tree2)

--------------
lxml.etree:        (2, 1, 5, 0)
libxml used:       (2, 7, 3)
libxml compiled:   (2, 6, 32)
libxslt used:      (1, 1, 24)
libxslt compiled:  (1, 1, 24)
<type 'lxml.etree._Element'>
<type 'lxml.etree._ElementTree'>
'lxml.etree._Element' object has no attribute 'write'

-- 
David Gardner
Pipeline Tools Programmer, "Sid the Science Kid"
Jim Henson Creature Shop
dgardner at creatureshop.com