Why is etree.tostring() not working for different methods?

Question

Why is etree.tostring() not working for different methods?

1k views Asked by Raspberry Rifleman At 10 September 2024 at 16:42

I'm learning XML and am trying the following exercise code:

root = etree.XML('<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>')
etree.tostring(root, method='xml')
print(etree.tostring(root))
etree.tostring(root, method='html') 
print(etree.tostring(root))
etree.tostring(root, method='text') 
print(etree.tostring(root))

In the exercise, it says if I do this, I should be getting 3 differently formatted output strings for root: xml, html and text. However, I'm just getting 3 XML-formatted outputs.

What am I missing here? Was I supposed to import something? My suspicion is that something is amiss with the etree.XML assignment part, but as I say: I'm just following directions here. What do people think is amiss?

Original Q&A

There are 1 answers

**kjhughes** · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-25 19:51:58

The results of the tostring() calls are indeed different but are lost each time, and you're instead printing the same expression three times. (Be aware that tostring() is returning a result, not modifying its arguments in place.)

If you instead run this script:

from lxml import etree

root = etree.XML('<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>')
print(etree.tostring(root, method='xml'))
print(etree.tostring(root, method='html'))
print(etree.tostring(root, method='text'))

You'll get the output you expect:

<html><head/><body><p>Hello<br/>World</p></body></html>
<html><head></head><body><p>Hello<br>World</p></body></html>
HelloWorld

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Why is etree.tostring() not working for different methods?

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