Import error when using XPath from PyXML-0.8.4

Question

I'm learning Xpath and XSLT using Python 2.6.6-64bit on my unix workstation. For Xpath, I'm using the xpath module provided in PyXml-0.8.4.

However, the import line itself throws the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "xp.py", line 7, in <module>
    from xml.xpath          import Evaluate
  File "/usr/local/python-2.6.6-64bit/lib/python2.6/site-packages/_xmlplus/xpath/__init__.py", line 112, in <module>
    from pyxpath import ExprParserFactory
  File "/usr/local/python-2.6.6-64bit/lib/python2.6/site-packages/_xmlplus/xpath/pyxpath.py", line 59, in <module>
    from xml.xpath.ParsedAbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath import ParsedAbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath
  File "/usr/local/python-2.6.6-64bit/lib/python2.6/site-packages/_xmlplus/xpath/ParsedAbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath.py", line 31
    as = ParsedAxisSpecifier.ParsedAxisSpecifier('descendant-or-self')
     ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Looking it up led me to understand that this is because 'as' is a reserved name in python-2.6 and PyXML-0.8.4 tries to redefine it. However, there are no directions on how to resolve this issue.

Please advise.

Answer 1

PyXML is obsolete and should not be used (see here). That's why there are no updates for it. Many features that were included in it were added to Python's standard library. There are also fully-supported third-party packages for Python XML processing like lxml.