How to create an objectified element with text with lxml

Question

I'd like to create an element tree (not parsing!) with lxml.objectify that might look like this:

<root>
  <child>Hello World</child>
</root>

My first attempt was to write code like this:

import lxml.objectify as o
from lxml.etree import tounicode
r = o.Element("root")
c = o.Element("child", text="Hello World")
r.append(c)
print(tounicode(r, pretty_print=True)

But that produces:

<root xmlns:py="http://codespeak.net/lxml/objectify/pytype" 
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
      xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" py:pytype="TREE">
  <child text="Hello World" data="Test" py:pytype="TREE"/>
</root>

As suggested in other answers, the <child> has no method _setText.

Apparently, lxml.objectifiy does not allow to create an element with text or change the text content. So, did I miss something?

Answer 1

From the doc and the answer you linked. You should use SubElement:

r = o.E.root()    # same as o.Element("root")
c = o.SubElement(r, "child")
c._setText("Hello World")
print(tounicode(r, pretty_print=True))

c._setText("Changed it!")
print(tounicode(r, pretty_print=True))

Output:

<root xmlns:py="http://codespeak.net/lxml/objectify/pytype" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <child>Hello World</child>
</root>

<root xmlns:py="http://codespeak.net/lxml/objectify/pytype" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <child>Changed it!</child>
</root>