[lxml-dev] lxml.objectify.deannotate refuses to clean nil nodes

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Holger wrote:
>> The nil node <Fubar/> is not deannotated as I would expect in the
>> following
>> snippet.  I could not find a reference to this behaviour in the archives
>> or
>> documentation.  Is this a design feature for which there is a work around,
>> or a bug?  I'm using lxml-2.2-py2.5-linux-i686.
> 
> Design feature.

I'd be a little more careful with such a big word. ;)


> Only py:pytype/xsi:type attributes get removed by deannotate():
> 
>>>> print etree.__version__
> 2.1.5
>>>> help(objectify.deannotate)
> 
> Help on built-in function deannotate in module lxml.objectify:
>  
> deannotate(...)
>     deannotate(element_or_tree, pytype=True, xsi=True)
>  
>     Recursively de-annotate the elements of an XML tree by removing 'pytype'
>     and/or 'type' attributes.
>  
>     If the 'pytype' keyword argument is True (the default), 'pytype' attributes
>     will be removed. If the 'xsi' keyword argument is True (the default),
>     'xsi:type' attributes will be removed.

Yes, so it's even implicitly documented. :)

Anyway, I'm not sure it's always a good idea to leave this special case in
instead of cleaning everything up. I think if you remove it, you'd get an
empty string result, which may be surprising - but more surprising than not
getting it cleaned up? After all, deannotate() means deannotate()...

Stefan