Features added

See also the features added for lxml 1.0beta to find out more about what's new.

• 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

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
• 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