[Python-Dev] elementtree in stdlib

Thu Apr 6 19:21:52 CEST 2006

Alex Martelli wrote:
> On Apr 5, 2006, at 8:30 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:
>>>>A while ago there was some discussion about including
>>elementtree in the std lib. I can't remember what the
>>conclusion about that was, but if it does go ahead,
>>I'd like to suggest that it be reorganised a bit.
>>>>I've just started playing with it, and having a
>>package called elementtree containing a module
>>called ElementTree containing a class called
>>ElementTree is just too confusing for words!
>>> Try the 2.5 alpha 1 just released, and you'll see that the toplevel 
> package is now xml.etree. The module and class are still called 
> ElementTree, though.

Note that lxml (which implements an ElementTree compatible API on top of 
libxml2) was using the 'etree' as a *module* (not a package name) before 
this move of ElementTree in the core. I had some discussions with 
Fredrik about making ElementTree in the Python core consistent with 
lxml, but no luck there.
I.e., this in ElementTree:
from elementtree.ElementTree import Element
is this in lxml:
from lxml.etree import Element
and I believe in python 2.5 it's now:
from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element
which is not good in my opinion... (though also not a disaster)
Regards,
Martijn