==============
lxml changelog
==============

2.1 (2008-07-09)
================

Features added
--------------

* Smart strings can be switched off in XPath (``smart_string`` keyword
  option).

* ``lxml.html.rewrite_links()`` strips links to work around documents
  with whitespace in URL attributes.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Custom resolvers were not used for XMLSchema includes/imports and
  XInclude processing.

* CSS selector parser dropped remaining expression after a function
  with parameters.

Other changes
-------------

* ``objectify.enableRecursiveStr()`` was removed, use
  ``objectify.enable_recursive_str()`` instead

* Speed-up when running XSLTs on documents from other threads


2.0.7 (2008-06-20)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Pickling ``ElementTree`` objects in lxml.objectify.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Descending dot-separated classes in CSS selectors were not resolved
  correctly.

* ``ElementTree.parse()`` didn't handle target parser result.

* Potential threading problem in XInclude.

* Crash in Element class lookup classes when the __init__() method of
  the super class is not called from Python subclasses.

Other changes
-------------

* Non-ASCII characters in attribute values are no longer escaped on
  serialisation.


2.1beta3 (2008-06-19)
=====================

Features added
--------------

* Major overhaul of ``tools/xpathgrep.py`` script.

* Pickling ``ElementTree`` objects in lxml.objectify.

* Support for parsing from file-like objects that return unicode
  strings.

* New function ``etree.cleanup_namespaces(el)`` that removes unused
  namespace declarations from a (sub)tree (experimental).

* XSLT results support the buffer protocol in Python 3.

* Polymorphic functions in ``lxml.html`` that accept either a tree or
  a parsable string will return either a UTF-8 encoded byte string, a
  unicode string or a tree, based on the type of the input.
  Previously, the result was always a byte string or a tree.

* Support for Python 2.6 and 3.0 beta.

* File name handling now uses a heuristic to convert between byte
  strings (usually filenames) and unicode strings (usually URLs).

* Parsing from a plain file object frees the GIL under Python 2.x.

* Running ``iterparse()`` on a plain file (or filename) frees the GIL
  on reading under Python 2.x.

* Conversion functions ``html_to_xhtml()`` and ``xhtml_to_html()`` in
  lxml.html (experimental).

* Most features in lxml.html work for XHTML namespaced tag names
  (experimental).

Bugs fixed
----------

* ``ElementTree.parse()`` didn't handle target parser result.

* Crash in Element class lookup classes when the __init__() method of
  the super class is not called from Python subclasses.

* A number of problems related to unicode/byte string conversion of
  filenames and error messages were fixed.

* Building on MacOS-X now passes the "flat_namespace" option to the C
  compiler, which reportedly prevents build quirks and crashes on this
  platform.

* Windows build was broken.

* Rare crash when serialising to a file object with certain encodings.

Other changes
-------------

* Non-ASCII characters in attribute values are no longer escaped on
  serialisation.

* Passing non-ASCII byte strings or invalid unicode strings as .tag,
  namespaces, etc. will result in a ValueError instead of an
  AssertionError (just like the tag well-formedness check).

* Up to several times faster attribute access (i.e. tree traversal) in
  lxml.objectify.


2.0.6 (2008-05-31)
==================

Features added
--------------

Bugs fixed
----------

* Incorrect evaluation of ``el.find("tag[child]")``.

* Windows build was broken.

* Moving a subtree from a document created in one thread into a
  document of another thread could crash when the rest of the source
  document is deleted while the subtree is still in use.

* Rare crash when serialising to a file object with certain encodings.

Other changes
-------------

* lxml should now build without problems on MacOS-X.


2.1beta2 (2008-05-02)
=====================

Features added
--------------

* All parse functions in lxml.html take a ``parser`` keyword argument.

* lxml.html has a new parser class ``XHTMLParser`` and a module
  attribute ``xhtml_parser`` that provide XML parsers that are
  pre-configured for the lxml.html package.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Moving a subtree from a document created in one thread into a
  document of another thread could crash when the rest of the source
  document is deleted while the subtree is still in use.

* Passing an nsmap when creating an Element will no longer strip
  redundantly defined namespace URIs.  This prevented the definition
  of more than one prefix for a namespace on the same Element.

Other changes
-------------

* If the default namespace is redundantly defined with a prefix on the
  same Element, the prefix will now be preferred for subelements and
  attributes.  This allows users to work around a problem in libxml2
  where attributes from the default namespace could serialise without
  a prefix even when they appear on an Element with a different
  namespace (i.e. they would end up in the wrong namespace).


2.0.5 (2008-05-01)
==================

Features added
--------------

Bugs fixed
----------

* Resolving to a filename in custom resolvers didn't work.

* lxml did not honour libxslt's second error state "STOPPED", which
  let some XSLT errors pass silently.

* Memory leak in Schematron with libxml2 >= 2.6.31.

Other changes
-------------


2.1beta1 (2008-04-15)
=====================

Features added
--------------

* Error logging in Schematron (requires libxml2 2.6.32 or later).

* Parser option ``strip_cdata`` for normalising or keeping CDATA
  sections.  Defaults to ``True`` as before, thus replacing CDATA
  sections by their text content.

* ``CDATA()`` factory to wrap string content as CDATA section.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Resolving to a filename in custom resolvers didn't work.

* lxml did not honour libxslt's second error state "STOPPED", which
  let some XSLT errors pass silently.

* Memory leak in Schematron with libxml2 >= 2.6.31.

* lxml.etree accepted non well-formed namespace prefix names.

Other changes
-------------

* Major cleanup in internal ``moveNodeToDocument()`` function, which
  takes care of namespace cleanup when moving elements between
  different namespace contexts.

* New Elements created through the ``makeelement()`` method of an HTML
  parser or through lxml.html now end up in a new HTML document
  (doctype HTML 4.01 Transitional) instead of a generic XML document.
  This mostly impacts the serialisation and the availability of a DTD
  context.


2.0.4 (2008-04-13)
==================

Features added
--------------

Bugs fixed
----------

* Hanging thread in conjunction with GTK threading.

* Crash bug in iterparse when moving elements into other documents.

* HTML elements' ``.cssselect()`` method was broken.

* ``ElementTree.find*()`` didn't accept QName objects.

Other changes
-------------


2.1alpha1 (2008-03-27)
======================

Features added
--------------

* New event types 'comment' and 'pi' in ``iterparse()``.

* ``XSLTAccessControl`` instances have a property ``options`` that
  returns a dict of access configuration options.

* Constant instances ``DENY_ALL`` and ``DENY_WRITE`` on
  ``XSLTAccessControl`` class.

* Extension elements for XSLT (experimental!)

* ``Element.base`` property returns the xml:base or HTML base URL of
  an Element.

* ``docinfo.URL`` property is writable.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Default encoding for plain text serialisation was different from
  that of XML serialisation (UTF-8 instead of ASCII).

Other changes
-------------

* Minor API speed-ups.

* The benchmark suite now uses tail text in the trees, which makes the
  absolute numbers incomparable to previous results.

* Generating the HTML documentation now requires Pygments_, which is
  used to enable syntax highlighting for the doctest examples.

.. _Pygments: http://pygments.org/

Most long-time deprecated functions and methods were removed:

- ``etree.clearErrorLog()``, use ``etree.clear_error_log()``

- ``etree.useGlobalPythonLog()``, use
  ``etree.use_global_python_log()``

- ``etree.ElementClassLookup.setFallback()``, use
  ``etree.ElementClassLookup.set_fallback()``

- ``etree.getDefaultParser()``, use ``etree.get_default_parser()``

- ``etree.setDefaultParser()``, use ``etree.set_default_parser()``

- ``etree.setElementClassLookup()``, use
  ``etree.set_element_class_lookup()``

  Note that ``parser.setElementClassLookup()`` has not been removed
  yet, although ``parser.set_element_class_lookup()`` should be used
  instead.

- ``xpath_evaluator.registerNamespace()``, use
  ``xpath_evaluator.register_namespace()``

- ``xpath_evaluator.registerNamespaces()``, use
  ``xpath_evaluator.register_namespaces()``

- ``objectify.setPytypeAttributeTag``, use
  ``objectify.set_pytype_attribute_tag``

- ``objectify.setDefaultParser()``, use
  ``objectify.set_default_parser()``


2.0.3 (2008-03-26)
==================

Features added
--------------

* soupparser.parse() allows passing keyword arguments on to
  BeautifulSoup.

* ``fromstring()`` method in ``lxml.html.soupparser``.

Bugs fixed
----------

* ``lxml.html.diff`` didn't treat empty tags properly (e.g.,
  ``<br>``).

* Handle entity replacements correctly in target parser.

* Crash when using ``iterparse()`` with XML Schema validation.

* The BeautifulSoup parser (soupparser.py) did not replace entities,
  which made them turn up in text content.

* Attribute assignment of custom PyTypes in objectify could fail to
  correctly serialise the value to a string.

Other changes
-------------

* ``lxml.html.ElementSoup`` was replaced by a new module
  ``lxml.html.soupparser`` with a more consistent API.  The old module
  remains for compatibility with ElementTree's own ElementSoup module.

* Setting the XSLT_CONFIG and XML2_CONFIG environment variables at
  build time will let setup.py pick up the ``xml2-config`` and
  ``xslt-config`` scripts from the supplied path name.

* Passing ``--with-xml2-config=/path/to/xml2-config`` to setup.py will
  override the ``xml2-config`` script that is used to determine the C
  compiler options.  The same applies for the ``--with-xslt-config``
  option.


2.0.2 (2008-02-22)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Support passing ``base_url`` to file parser functions to override
  the filename of the file(-like) object.

Bugs fixed
----------

* The prefix for objectify's pytype namespace was missing from the set
  of default prefixes.

* Memory leak in Schematron (fixed only for libxml2 2.6.31+).

* Error type names in RelaxNG were reported incorrectly.

* Slice deletion bug fixed in objectify.

Other changes
-------------

* Enabled doctests for some Python modules (especially ``lxml.html``).

* Add a ``method`` argument to ``lxml.html.tostring()``
  (``method="xml"`` for XHTML output).

* Make it clearer that methods like ``lxml.html.fromstring()`` take a
  ``base_url`` argument.


2.0.1 (2008-02-13)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Child iteration in ``lxml.pyclasslookup``.

* Loads of new docstrings reflect the signature of functions and
  methods to make them visible in API docs and ``help()``

Bugs fixed
----------

* The module ``lxml.html.builder`` was duplicated as
  ``lxml.htmlbuilder``

* Form elements would return None for ``form.fields.keys()`` if there
  was an unnamed input field.  Now unnamed input fields are completely
  ignored.

* Setting an element slice in objectify could insert slice-overlapping
  elements at the wrong position.

Other changes
-------------

* The generated API documentation was cleaned up and disburdened from
  non-public classes etc.

* The previously public module ``lxml.html.setmixin`` was renamed to
  ``lxml.html._setmixin`` as it is not an official part of lxml.  If
  you want to use it, feel free to copy it over to your own source
  base.

* Passing ``--with-xslt-config=/path/to/xslt-config`` to setup.py will
  override the ``xslt-config`` script that is used to determine the C
  compiler options.


2.0 (2008-02-01)
================

Features added
--------------

* Passing the ``unicode`` type as ``encoding`` to ``tostring()`` will
  serialise to unicode.  The ``tounicode()`` function is now
  deprecated.

* ``XMLSchema()`` and ``RelaxNG()`` can parse from StringIO.

* ``makeparser()`` function in ``lxml.objectify`` to create a new
  parser with the usual objectify setup.

* Plain ASCII XPath string results are no longer forced into unicode
  objects as in 2.0beta1, but are returned as plain strings as before.

* All XPath string results are 'smart' objects that have a
  ``getparent()`` method to retrieve their parent Element.

* ``with_tail`` option in serialiser functions.

* More accurate exception messages in validator creation.

* Parse-time XML schema validation (``schema`` parser keyword).

* XPath string results of the ``text()`` function and attribute
  selection make their Element container accessible through a
  ``getparent()`` method.  As a side-effect, they are now always
  unicode objects (even ASCII strings).

* ``XSLT`` objects are usable in any thread - at the cost of a deep
  copy if they were not created in that thread.

* Invalid entity names and character references will be rejected by
  the ``Entity()`` factory.

* ``entity.text`` returns the textual representation of the entity,
  e.g. ``&amp;``.

* New properties ``position`` and ``code`` on ParseError exception (as
  in ET 1.3)

* Rich comparison of ``element.attrib`` proxies.

* ElementTree compatible TreeBuilder class.

* Use default prefixes for some common XML namespaces.

* ``lxml.html.clean.Cleaner`` now allows for a ``host_whitelist``, and
  two overridable methods: ``allow_embedded_url(el, url)`` and the
  more general ``allow_element(el)``.

* Extended slicing of Elements as in ``element[1:-1:2]``, both in
  etree and in objectify

* Resolvers can now provide a ``base_url`` keyword argument when
  resolving a document as string data.

* When using ``lxml.doctestcompare`` you can give the doctest option
  ``NOPARSE_MARKUP`` (like ``# doctest: +NOPARSE_MARKUP``) to suppress
  the special checking for one test.

* Separate ``feed_error_log`` property for the feed parser interface.
  The normal parser interface and ``iterparse`` continue to use
  ``error_log``.

* The normal parsers and the feed parser interface are now separated
  and can be used concurrently on the same parser instance.

* ``fromstringlist()`` and ``tostringlist()`` functions as in
  ElementTree 1.3

* ``iterparse()`` accepts an ``html`` boolean keyword argument for
  parsing with the HTML parser (note that this interface may be
  subject to change)

* Parsers accept an ``encoding`` keyword argument that overrides the encoding
  of the parsed documents.

* New C-API function ``hasChild()`` to test for children

* ``annotate()`` function in objectify can annotate with Python types and XSI
  types in one step.  Accompanied by ``xsiannotate()`` and ``pyannotate()``.

* ``ET.write()``, ``tostring()`` and ``tounicode()`` now accept a keyword
  argument ``method`` that can be one of 'xml' (or None), 'html' or 'text' to
  serialise as XML, HTML or plain text content.

* ``iterfind()`` method on Elements returns an iterator equivalent to
  ``findall()``

* ``itertext()`` method on Elements

* Setting a QName object as value of the .text property or as an attribute
  will resolve its prefix in the respective context

* ElementTree-like parser target interface as described in
  http://effbot.org/elementtree/elementtree-xmlparser.htm

* ElementTree-like feed parser interface on XMLParser and HTMLParser
  (``feed()`` and ``close()`` methods)

* Reimplemented ``objectify.E`` for better performance and improved
  integration with objectify.  Provides extended type support based on
  registered PyTypes.

* XSLT objects now support deep copying

* New ``makeSubElement()`` C-API function that allows creating a new
  subelement straight with text, tail and attributes.

* XPath extension functions can now access the current context node
  (``context.context_node``) and use a context dictionary
  (``context.eval_context``) from the context provided in their first
  parameter

* HTML tag soup parser based on BeautifulSoup in ``lxml.html.ElementSoup``

* New module ``lxml.doctestcompare`` by Ian Bicking for writing simplified
  doctests based on XML/HTML output.  Use by importing ``lxml.usedoctest`` or
  ``lxml.html.usedoctest`` from within a doctest.

* New module ``lxml.cssselect`` by Ian Bicking for selecting Elements with CSS
  selectors.

* New package ``lxml.html`` written by Ian Bicking for advanced HTML
  treatment.

* Namespace class setup is now local to the ``ElementNamespaceClassLookup``
  instance and no longer global.

* Schematron validation (incomplete in libxml2)

* Additional ``stringify`` argument to ``objectify.PyType()`` takes a
  conversion function to strings to support setting text values from arbitrary
  types.

* Entity support through an ``Entity`` factory and element classes.  XML
  parsers now have a ``resolve_entities`` keyword argument that can be set to
  False to keep entities in the document.

* ``column`` field on error log entries to accompany the ``line`` field

* Error specific messages in XPath parsing and evaluation
  NOTE: for evaluation errors, you will now get an XPathEvalError instead of
  an XPathSyntaxError.  To catch both, you can except on ``XPathError``

* The regular expression functions in XPath now support passing a node-set
  instead of a string

* Extended type annotation in objectify: new ``xsiannotate()`` function

* EXSLT RegExp support in standard XPath (not only XSLT)

Bugs fixed
----------

* Missing import in ``lxml.html.clean``.

* Some Python 2.4-isms prevented lxml from building/running under
  Python 2.3.

* XPath on ElementTrees could crash when selecting the virtual root
  node of the ElementTree.

* Compilation ``--without-threading`` was buggy in alpha5/6.

* Memory leak in the ``parse()`` function.

* Minor bugs in XSLT error message formatting.

* Result document memory leak in target parser.

* Target parser failed to report comments.

* In the ``lxml.html`` ``iter_links`` method, links in ``<object>``
  tags weren't recognized.  (Note: plugin-specific link parameters
  still aren't recognized.)  Also, the ``<embed>`` tag, though not
  standard, is now included in ``lxml.html.defs.special_inline_tags``.

* Using custom resolvers on XSLT stylesheets parsed from a string
  could request ill-formed URLs.

* With ``lxml.doctestcompare`` if you do ``<tag xmlns="...">`` in your
  output, it will then be namespace-neutral (before the ellipsis was
  treated as a real namespace).

* AttributeError in feed parser on parse errors

* XML feed parser setup problem

* Type annotation for unicode strings in ``DataElement()``

* lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements other than the
  root node of a tree

* Race condition in XSLT where the resolver context leaked between concurrent
  XSLT calls

* lxml.etree did not check tag/attribute names

* The XML parser did not report undefined entities as error

* The text in exceptions raised by XML parsers, validators and XPath
  evaluators now reports the first error that occurred instead of the last

* Passing '' as XPath namespace prefix did not raise an error

* Thread safety in XPath evaluators

Other changes
-------------

* Exceptions carry only the part of the error log that is related to
  the operation that caused the error.

* ``XMLSchema()`` and ``RelaxNG()`` now enforce passing the source
  file/filename through the ``file`` keyword argument.

* The test suite now skips most doctests under Python 2.3.

* ``make clean`` no longer removes the .c files (use ``make
  realclean`` instead)

* Minor performance tweaks for Element instantiation and subelement
  creation

* Various places in the XPath, XSLT and iteration APIs now require
  keyword-only arguments.

* The argument order in ``element.itersiblings()`` was changed to
  match the order used in all other iteration methods.  The second
  argument ('preceding') is now a keyword-only argument.

* The ``getiterator()`` method on Elements and ElementTrees was
  reverted to return an iterator as it did in lxml 1.x.  The ET API
  specification allows it to return either a sequence or an iterator,
  and it traditionally returned a sequence in ET and an iterator in
  lxml.  However, it is now deprecated in favour of the ``iter()``
  method, which should be used in new code wherever possible.

* The 'pretty printed' serialisation of ElementTree objects now
  inserts newlines at the root level between processing instructions,
  comments and the root tag.

* A 'pretty printed' serialisation is now terminated with a newline.

* Second argument to ``lxml.etree.Extension()`` helper is no longer
  required, third argument is now a keyword-only argument ``ns``.

* ``lxml.html.tostring`` takes an ``encoding`` argument.

* The module source files were renamed to "lxml.*.pyx", such as
  "lxml.etree.pyx".  This was changed for consistency with the way
  Pyrex commonly handles package imports.  The main effect is that
  classes now know about their fully qualified class name, including
  the package name of their module.

* Keyword-only arguments in some API functions, especially in the
  parsers and serialisers.

* Tag name validation in lxml.etree (and lxml.html) now distinguishes
  between HTML tags and XML tags based on the parser that was used to
  parse or create them.  HTML tags no longer reject any non-ASCII
  characters in tag names but only spaces and the special characters
  ``<>&/"'``.

* lxml.etree now emits a warning if you use XPath with libxml2 2.6.27
  (which can crash on certain XPath errors)

* Type annotation in objectify now preserves the already annotated type by
  default to prevent loosing type information that is already there.

* ``element.getiterator()`` returns a list, use ``element.iter()`` to retrieve
  an iterator (ElementTree 1.3 compatible behaviour)

* objectify.PyType for None is now called "NoneType"

* ``el.getiterator()`` renamed to ``el.iter()``, following ElementTree 1.3 -
  original name is still available as alias

* In the public C-API, ``findOrBuildNodeNs()`` was replaced by the more
  generic ``findOrBuildNodeNsPrefix``

* Major refactoring in XPath/XSLT extension function code

* Network access in parsers disabled by default


1.3.6 (2007-10-29)
==================

Bugs fixed
----------

* Backported decref crash fix from 2.0

* Well hidden free-while-in-use crash bug in ObjectPath

Other changes
-------------

* The test suites now run ``gc.collect()`` in the ``tearDown()``
  methods.  While this makes them take a lot longer to run, it also
  makes it easier to link a specific test to garbage collection
  problems that would otherwise appear in later tests.


1.3.5 (2007-10-22)
==================

Features added
--------------

Bugs fixed
----------

* lxml.etree could crash when adding more than 10000 namespaces to a
  document

* lxml failed to serialise namespace declarations of elements other
  than the root node of a tree


1.3.4 (2007-08-30)
==================

Features added
--------------

* The ``ElementMaker`` in ``lxml.builder`` now accepts the keyword arguments
  ``namespace`` and ``nsmap`` to set a namespace and nsmap for the Elements it
  creates.

* The ``docinfo`` on ElementTree objects has new properties ``internalDTD``
  and ``externalDTD`` that return a DTD object for the internal or external
  subset of the document respectively.

* Serialising an ElementTree now includes any internal DTD subsets that are
  part of the document, as well as comments and PIs that are siblings of the
  root node.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Parsing with the ``no_network`` option could fail

Other changes
-------------

* lxml now raises a TagNameWarning about tag names containing ':' instead of
  an Error as 1.3.3 did.  The reason is that a number of projects currently
  misuse the previous lack of tag name validation to generate namespace
  prefixes without declaring namespaces.  Apart from the danger of generating
  broken XML this way, it also breaks most of the namespace-aware tools in
  XML, including XPath, XSLT and validation.  lxml 1.3.x will continue to
  support this bug with a Warning, while lxml 2.0 will be strict about
  well-formed tag names (not only regarding ':').

* Serialising an Element no longer includes its comment and PI siblings (only
  ElementTree serialisation includes them).


1.3.3 (2007-07-26)
==================

Features added
--------------

* ElementTree compatible parser ``ETCompatXMLParser`` strips processing
  instructions and comments while parsing XML

* Parsers now support stripping PIs (keyword argument 'remove_pis')

* ``etree.fromstring()`` now supports parsing both HTML and XML, depending on
  the parser you pass.

* Support ``base_url`` keyword argument in ``HTML()`` and ``XML()``

Bugs fixed
----------

* Parsing from Python Unicode strings failed on some platforms

* ``Element()`` did not raise an exception on tag names containing ':'

* ``Element.getiterator(tag)`` did not accept ``Comment`` and
  ``ProcessingInstruction`` as tags. It also accepts ``Element`` now.


1.3.2 (2007-07-03)
==================

Features added
--------------

Bugs fixed
----------

* "deallocating None" crash bug


1.3.1 (2007-07-02)
==================

Features added
--------------

* objectify.DataElement now supports setting values from existing data
  elements (not just plain Python types) and reuses defined namespaces etc.

* E-factory support for lxml.objectify (``objectify.E``)

Bugs fixed
----------

* Better way to prevent crashes in Element proxy cleanup code

* objectify.DataElement didn't set up None value correctly

* objectify.DataElement didn't check the value against the provided type hints

* Reference-counting bug in ``Element.attrib.pop()``


1.3 (2007-06-24)
================

Features added
--------------

* Module ``lxml.pyclasslookup`` module implements an Element class lookup
  scheme that can access the entire tree in read-only mode to help determining
  a suitable Element class

* Parsers take a ``remove_comments`` keyword argument that skips over comments

* ``parse()`` function in ``objectify``, corresponding to ``XML()`` etc.

* ``Element.addnext(el)`` and ``Element.addprevious(el)`` methods to support
  adding processing instructions and comments around the root node

* ``Element.attrib`` was missing ``clear()`` and ``pop()`` methods

* Extended type annotation in objectify: cleaner annotation namespace setup
  plus new ``deannotate()`` function

* Support for custom Element class instantiation in lxml.sax: passing a
  ``makeelement`` function to the ElementTreeContentHandler will reuse the
  lookup context of that function

* '.' represents empty ObjectPath (identity)

* ``Element.values()`` to accompany the existing ``.keys()`` and ``.items()``

* ``collectAttributes()`` C-function to build a list of attribute
  keys/values/items for a libxml2 node

* ``DTD`` validator class (like ``RelaxNG`` and ``XMLSchema``)

* HTML generator helpers by Fredrik Lundh in ``lxml.htmlbuilder``

* ``ElementMaker`` XML generator by Fredrik Lundh in ``lxml.builder.E``

* Support for pickeling ``objectify.ObjectifiedElement`` objects to XML

* ``update()`` method on Element.attrib

* Optimised replacement for libxml2's _xmlReconsiliateNs(). This allows lxml
  a better handling of namespaces when moving elements between documents.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Removing Elements from a tree could make them loose their namespace
  declarations

* ``ElementInclude`` didn't honour base URL of original document

* Replacing the children slice of an Element would cut off the tails of the
  original children

* ``Element.getiterator(tag)`` did not accept ``Comment`` and
  ``ProcessingInstruction`` as tags

* API functions now check incoming strings for XML conformity.  Zero bytes or
  low ASCII characters are no longer accepted (AssertionError).

* XSLT parsing failed to pass resolver context on to imported documents

* passing '' as namespace prefix in nsmap could be passed through to libxml2

* Objectify couldn't handle prefixed XSD type names in ``xsi:type``

* More ET compatible behaviour when writing out XML declarations or not

* More robust error handling in ``iterparse()``

* Documents lost their top-level PIs and comments on serialisation

* lxml.sax failed on comments and PIs. Comments are now properly ignored and
  PIs are copied.

* Possible memory leaks in namespace handling when moving elements between
  documents

Other changes
-------------

* major restructuring in the documentation


1.2.1 (2007-02-27)
==================

Bugs fixed
----------

* Build fixes for MS compiler

* Item assignments to special names like ``element["text"]`` failed

* Renamed ObjectifiedDataElement.__setText() to _setText() to make it easier
  to access

* The pattern for attribute names in ObjectPath was too restrictive


1.2 (2007-02-20)
================

Features added
--------------

* Rich comparison of QName objects

* Support for regular expressions in benchmark selection

* get/set emulation (not .attrib!) for attributes on processing instructions

* ElementInclude Python module for ElementTree compatible XInclude processing
  that honours custom resolvers registered with the source document

* ElementTree.parser property holds the parser used to parse the document

* setup.py has been refactored for greater readability and flexibility

* --rpath flag to setup.py to induce automatic linking-in of dynamic library
  runtime search paths has been renamed to --auto-rpath. This makes it
  possible to pass an --rpath directly to distutils; previously this was being
  shadowed.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Element instantiation now uses locks to prevent race conditions with threads

* ElementTree.write() did not raise an exception when the file was not writable

* Error handling could crash under Python <= 2.4.1 - fixed by disabling thread
  support in these environments

* Element.find*() did not accept QName objects as path

Other changes
-------------

* code cleanup: redundant _NodeBase super class merged into _Element class
  Note: although the impact should be zero in most cases, this change breaks
  the compatibiliy of the public C-API


1.1.2 (2006-10-30)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Data elements in objectify support repr(), which is now used by dump()

* Source distribution now ships with a patched Pyrex

* New C-API function makeElement() to create new elements with text,
  tail, attributes and namespaces

* Reuse original parser flags for XInclude

* Simplified support for handling XSLT processing instructions

Bugs fixed
----------

* Parser resources were not freed before the next parser run

* Open files and XML strings returned by Python resolvers were not
  closed/freed

* Crash in the IDDict returned by XMLDTDID

* Copying Comments and ProcessingInstructions failed

* Memory leak for external URLs in _XSLTProcessingInstruction.parseXSL()

* Memory leak when garbage collecting tailed root elements

* HTML script/style content was not propagated to .text

* Show text xincluded between text nodes correctly in .text and .tail

* 'integer * objectify.StringElement' operation was not supported


1.1.1 (2006-09-21)
==================

Features added
--------------

* XSLT profiling support (``profile_run`` keyword)

* countchildren() method on objectify.ObjectifiedElement

* Support custom elements for tree nodes in lxml.objectify

Bugs fixed
----------

* lxml.objectify failed to support long data values (e.g., "123L")

* Error messages from XSLT did not reach ``XSLT.error_log``

* Factories objectify.Element() and objectify.DataElement() were missing
  ``attrib`` and ``nsmap`` keyword arguments

* Changing the default parser in lxml.objectify did not update the factories
  Element() and DataElement()

* Let lxml.objectify.Element() always generate tree elements (not data
  elements)

* Build under Windows failed ('\0' bug in patched Pyrex version)


1.1 (2006-09-13)
================

Features added
--------------

* Comments and processing instructions return '<!-- coment -->' and
  '<?pi-target content?>' for repr()

* Parsers are now the preferred (and default) place where element class lookup
  schemes should be registered.  Namespace lookup is no longer supported by
  default.

* Support for Python 2.5 beta

* Unlock the GIL for deep copying documents and for XPath()

* New ``compact`` keyword argument for parsing read-only documents

* Support for parser options in iterparse()

* The ``namespace`` axis is supported in XPath and returns (prefix, URI)
  tuples

* The XPath expression "/" now returns an empty list instead of raising an
  exception

* XML-Object API on top of lxml (lxml.objectify)

* Customizable Element class lookup:

  * different pre-implemented lookup mechanisms

  * support for externally provided lookup functions

* Support for processing instructions (ET-like, not compatible)

* Public C-level API for independent extension modules

* Module level ``iterwalk()`` function as 'iterparse' for trees

* Module level ``iterparse()`` function similar to ElementTree (see
  documentation for differences)

* Element.nsmap property returns a mapping of all namespace prefixes known at
  the Element to their namespace URI

* Reentrant threading support in RelaxNG, XMLSchema and XSLT

* Threading support in parsers and serializers:

  * All in-memory operations (tostring, parse(StringIO), etc.) free the GIL

  * File operations (on file names) free the GIL

  * Reading from file-like objects frees the GIL and reacquires it for reading

  * Serialisation to file-like objects is single-threaded (high lock overhead)

* Element iteration over XPath axes:

  * Element.iterdescendants() iterates over the descendants of an element

  * Element.iterancestors() iterates over the ancestors of an element (from
    parent to parent)

  * Element.itersiblings() iterates over either the following or preceding
    siblings of an element

  * Element.iterchildren() iterates over the children of an element in either
    direction

  * All iterators support the ``tag`` keyword argument to restrict the
    generated elements

* Element.getnext() and Element.getprevious() return the direct siblings of an
  element

Bugs fixed
----------

* filenames with local 8-bit encoding were not supported

* 1.1beta did not compile under Python 2.3

* ignore unknown 'pyval' attribute values in objectify

* objectify.ObjectifiedElement.addattr() failed to accept Elements and Lists

* objectify.ObjectPath.setattr() failed to accept Elements and Lists

* XPathSyntaxError now inherits from XPathError

* Threading race conditions in RelaxNG and XMLSchema

* Crash when mixing elements from XSLT results into other trees, concurrent
  XSLT is only allowed when the stylesheet was parsed in the main thread

* The EXSLT ``regexp:match`` function now works as defined (except for some
  differences in the regular expression syntax)

* Setting element.text to '' returned None on request, not the empty string

* ``iterparse()`` could crash on long XML files

* Creating documents no longer copies the parser for later URL resolving.  For
  performance reasons, only a reference is kept.  Resolver updates on the
  parser will now be reflected by documents that were parsed before the
  change.  Although this should rarely become visible, it is a behavioral
  change from 1.0.


1.0.4 (2006-09-09)
==================

Features added
--------------

* List-like ``Element.extend()`` method

Bugs fixed
----------

* Crash in tail handling in ``Element.replace()``


1.0.3 (2006-08-08)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Element.replace(old, new) method to replace a subelement by another one

Bugs fixed
----------

* Crash when mixing elements from XSLT results into other trees

* Copying/deepcopying did not work for ElementTree objects

* Setting an attribute to a non-string value did not raise an exception

* Element.remove() deleted the tail text from the removed Element


1.0.2 (2006-06-27)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Support for setting a custom default Element class as opposed to namespace
  specific classes (which still override the default class)

Bugs fixed
----------

* Rare exceptions in Python list functions were not handled

* Parsing accepted unicode strings with XML encoding declaration in certain
  cases

* Parsing 8-bit encoded strings from StringIO objects raised an exception

* Module function ``initThread()`` was removed - useless (and never worked)

* XSLT and parser exception messages include the error line number


1.0.1 (2006-06-09)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Repeated calls to Element.attrib now efficiently return the same instance

Bugs fixed
----------

* Document deallocation could crash in certain garbage collection scenarios

* Extension function calls in XSLT variable declarations could break the
  stylesheet and crash on repeated calls

* Deep copying Elements could loose namespaces declared in parents

* Deep copying Elements did not copy tail

* Parsing file(-like) objects failed to load external entities

* Parsing 8-bit strings from file(-like) objects raised an exception

* xsl:include failed when the stylesheet was parsed from a file-like object

* lxml.sax.ElementTreeProducer did not call startDocument() / endDocument()

* MSVC compiler complained about long strings (supports only 2048 bytes)


1.0 (2006-06-01)
================

Features added
--------------

* Element.getiterator() and the findall() methods support finding arbitrary
  elements from a namespace (pattern ``{namespace}*``)

* Another speedup in tree iteration code

* General speedup of Python Element object creation and deallocation

* Writing C14N no longer serializes in memory (reduced memory footprint)

* PyErrorLog for error logging through the Python ``logging`` module

* ``Element.getroottree()`` returns an ElementTree for the root node of the
  document that contains the element.

* ElementTree.getpath(element) returns a simple, absolute XPath expression to
  find the element in the tree structure

* Error logs have a ``last_error`` attribute for convenience

* Comment texts can be changed through the API

* Formatted output via ``pretty_print`` keyword in serialization functions

* XSLT can block access to file system and network via ``XSLTAccessControl``

* ElementTree.write() no longer serializes in memory (reduced memory
  footprint)

* Speedup of Element.findall(tag) and Element.getiterator(tag)

* Support for writing the XML representation of Elements and ElementTrees to
  Python unicode strings via ``etree.tounicode()``

* Support for writing XSLT results to Python unicode strings via ``unicode()``

* Parsing a unicode string no longer copies the string (reduced memory
  footprint)

* Parsing file-like objects reads chunks rather than the whole file (reduced
  memory footprint)

* Parsing StringIO objects from the start avoids copying the string (reduced
  memory footprint)

* Read-only 'docinfo' attribute in ElementTree class holds DOCTYPE
  information, original encoding and XML version as seen by the parser

* etree module can be compiled without libxslt by commenting out the line
  ``include "xslt.pxi"`` near the end of the etree.pyx source file

* Better error messages in parser exceptions

* Error reporting also works in XSLT

* Support for custom document loaders (URI resolvers) in parsers and XSLT,
  resolvers are registered at parser level

* Implementation of exslt:regexp for XSLT based on the Python 're' module,
  enabled by default, can be switched off with 'regexp=False' keyword argument

* Support for exslt extensions (libexslt) and libxslt extra functions
  (node-set, document, write, output)

* Substantial speedup in XPath.evaluate()

* HTMLParser for parsing (broken) HTML

* XMLDTDID function parses XML into tuple (root node, ID dict) based on xml:id
  implementation of libxml2 (as opposed to ET compatible XMLID)

Bugs fixed
----------

* Memory leak in Element.__setitem__

* Memory leak in Element.attrib.items() and Element.attrib.values()

* Memory leak in XPath extension functions

* Memory leak in unicode related setup code

* Element now raises ValueError on empty tag names

* Namespace fixing after moving elements between documents could fail if the
  source document was freed too early

* Setting namespace-less tag names on namespaced elements ('{ns}t' -> 't')
  didn't reset the namespace

* Unknown constants from newer libxml2 versions could raise exceptions in the
  error handlers

* lxml.etree compiles much faster

* On libxml2 <= 2.6.22, parsing strings with encoding declaration could fail
  in certain cases

* Document reference in ElementTree objects was not updated when the root
  element was moved to a different document

* Running absolute XPath expressions on an Element now evaluates against the
  root tree

* Evaluating absolute XPath expressions (``/*``) on an ElementTree could fail

* Crashes when calling XSLT, RelaxNG, etc. with uninitialized ElementTree
  objects

* Removed public function ``initThreadLogging()``, replaced by more general
  ``initThread()`` which fixes a number of setup problems in threads

* Memory leak when using iconv encoders in tostring/write

* Deep copying Elements and ElementTrees maintains the document information

* Serialization functions raise LookupError for unknown encodings

* Memory deallocation crash resulting from deep copying elements

* Some ElementTree methods could crash if the root node was not initialized
  (neither file nor element passed to the constructor)

* Element/SubElement failed to set attribute namespaces from passed ``attrib``
  dictionary

* ``tostring()`` adds an XML declaration for non-ASCII encodings

* ``tostring()`` failed to serialize encodings that contain 0-bytes

* ElementTree.xpath() and XPathDocumentEvaluator were not using the
  ElementTree root node as reference point

* Calling ``document('')`` in XSLT failed to return the stylesheet


0.9.2 (2006-05-10)
==================

Features added
--------------

* Speedup for Element.makeelement(): the new element reuses the original
  libxml2 document instead of creating a new empty one

* Speedup for reversed() iteration over element children (Py2.4+ only)

* ElementTree compatible QName class

* RelaxNG and XMLSchema accept any Element, not only ElementTrees

Bugs fixed
----------

* str(xslt_result) was broken for XSLT output other than UTF-8

* Memory leak if write_c14n fails to write the file after conversion

* Crash in XMLSchema and RelaxNG when passing non-schema documents

* Memory leak in RelaxNG() when RelaxNGParseError is raised

0.9.1 (2006-03-30)
==================

Features added
--------------

* lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler checks closing elements and raises
  SaxError on mismatch

* lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler supports namespace-less SAX events
  (startElement, endElement) and defaults to empty attributes (keyword
  argument)

* Speedup for repeatedly accessing element tag names

* Minor API performance improvements

Bugs fixed
----------

* Memory deallocation bug when using XSLT output method "html"

* sax.py was handling UTF-8 encoded tag names where it shouldn't

* lxml.tests package will no longer be installed (is still in source tar)

0.9 (2006-03-20)
================

Features added
--------------

* Error logging API for libxml2 error messages

* Various performance improvements

* Benchmark script for lxml, ElementTree and cElementTree

* Support for registering extension functions through new FunctionNamespace
  class (see doc/extensions.txt)

* ETXPath class for XPath expressions in ElementTree notation ('//{ns}tag')

* Support for variables in XPath expressions (also in XPath class)

* XPath class for compiled XPath expressions

* XMLID module level function (ElementTree compatible)

* XMLParser API for customized libxml2 parser configuration

* Support for custom Element classes through new Namespace API (see
  doc/namespace_extensions.txt)

* Common exception base class LxmlError for module exceptions

* real iterator support in iter(Element), Element.getiterator()

* XSLT objects are callable, result trees support str()

* Added MANIFEST.in for easier creation of RPM files.

* 'getparent' method on elements allows navigation to an element's
  parent element.

* Python core compatible SAX tree builder and SAX event generator. See
  doc/sax.txt for more information.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Segfaults and memory leaks in various API functions of Element

* Segfault in XSLT.tostring()

* ElementTree objects no longer interfere, Elements can be root of different
  ElementTrees at the same time

* document('') works in XSLT documents read from files (in-memory documents
  cannot support this due to libxslt deficiencies)

0.8 (2005-11-03)
================

Features added
--------------

* Support for copy.deepcopy() on elements. copy.copy() works also, but
  does the same thing, and does *not* create a shallow copy, as that
  makes no sense in the context of libxml2 trees. This means a
  potential incompatibility with ElementTree, but there's more chance
  that it works than if copy.copy() isn't supported at all.

* Increased compatibility with (c)ElementTree; .parse() on ElementTree is
  supported and parsing of gzipped XML files works.

* implemented index() on elements, allowing one to find the index of a
  SubElement.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Use xslt-config instead of xml2-config to find out libxml2
  directories to take into account a case where libxslt is installed
  in a different directory than libxslt.

* Eliminate crash condition in iteration when text nodes are changed.

* Passing 'None' to tostring() does not result in a segfault anymore,
  but an AssertionError.

* Some test fixes for Windows.

* Raise XMLSyntaxError and XPathSyntaxError instead of plain python
  syntax errors. This should be less confusing.

* Fixed error with uncaught exception in Pyrex code.

* Calling lxml.etree.fromstring('') throws XMLSyntaxError instead of a
  segfault.

* has_key() works on attrib. 'in' tests also work correctly on attrib.

* INSTALL.txt was saying 2.2.16 instead of 2.6.16 as a supported
  libxml2 version, as it should.

* Passing a UTF-8 encoded string to the XML() function would fail;
  fixed.

0.7 (2005-06-15)
================

Features added
--------------

* parameters (XPath expressions) can be passed to XSLT using keyword
  parameters.

* Simple XInclude support. Calling the xinclude() method on a tree
  will process any XInclude statements in the document.

* XMLSchema support. Use the XMLSchema class or the convenience
  xmlschema() method on a tree to do XML Schema (XSD) validation.

* Added convenience xslt() method on tree. This is less efficient
  than the XSLT object, but makes it easier to write quick code.

* Added convenience relaxng() method on tree. This is less efficient
  than the RelaxNG object, but makes it easier to write quick code.

* Make it possible to use XPathEvaluator with elements as well. The
  XPathEvaluator in this case will retain the element so multiple
  XPath queries can be made against one element efficiently. This
  replaces the second argument to the .evaluate() method that existed
  previously.

* Allow registerNamespace() to be called on an XPathEvaluator, after
  creation, to add additional namespaces. Also allow registerNamespaces(),
  which does the same for a namespace dictionary.

* Add 'prefix' attribute to element to be able to read prefix information.
  This is entirely read-only.

* It is possible to supply an extra nsmap keyword parameter to
  the Element() and SubElement() constructors, which supplies a
  prefix to namespace URI mapping. This will create namespace
  prefix declarations on these elements and these prefixes will show up
  in XML serialization.
  
Bugs fixed
----------
 
* Killed yet another memory management related bug: trees created
  using newDoc would not get a libxml2-level dictionary, which caused
  problems when deallocating these documents later if they contained a
  node that came from a document with a dictionary.

* Moving namespaced elements between documents was problematic as 
  references to the original document would remain. This has been fixed
  by applying xmlReconciliateNs() after each move operation.

* Can pass None to 'dump()' without segfaults.

* tostring() works properly for non-root elements as well.

* Cleaned out the tostring() method so it should handle encoding
  correctly.

* Cleaned out the ElementTree.write() method so it should handle encoding
  correctly. Writing directly to a file should also be faster, as there is no
  need to go through a Python string in that case. Made sure the test cases
  test both serializing to StringIO as well as serializing to a real file.

0.6 (2005-05-14)
================

Features added
--------------

* Changed setup.py so that library_dirs is also guessed. This should
  help with compilation on the Mac OS X platform, where otherwise the
  wrong library (shipping with the OS) could be picked up.

* Tweaked setup.py so that it picks up the version from version.txt.

Bugs fixed
----------

* Do the right thing when handling namespaced attributes.

* fix bug where tostring() moved nodes into new documents. tostring()
  had very nasty side-effects before this fix, sorry!

0.5.1 (2005-04-09)
==================

* Python 2.2 compatibility fixes.

* unicode fixes in Element() and Comment() as well as XML(); unicode
  input wasn't properly being UTF-8 encoded.

0.5 (2005-04-08)
================

Initial public release.
