lxml

6.0.2 · active · verified Sat Mar 28

lxml is a powerful and Pythonic XML processing library combining libxml2/libxslt with the ElementTree API. The current version is 6.0.2, released on March 28, 2026. It follows a regular release cadence, with recent versions 6.0.1 and 6.0.0 released on March 15, 2026, and March 1, 2026, respectively.

Warnings

breaking In version 5.2.0, the 'lxml.html.clean' module was moved to a separate project 'lxml_html_clean'.
Fix: Install 'lxml_html_clean' separately and update import statements accordingly.
gotcha XPath queries return lists; accessing the first element requires indexing.
Fix: Use 'result[0]' to access the first element of the XPath result list.

Install

pip install lxml Install lxml

Imports

etree
```
from lxml import etree
```
Ensure 'etree' is imported from 'lxml' for XML parsing.
html
```
from lxml import html
```
Ensure 'html' is imported from 'lxml' for HTML parsing.

Quickstart

This script demonstrates loading an XML file and performing an XPath query using lxml's etree module.

import os
from lxml import etree

# Load XML from a file
with open(os.environ.get('XML_FILE_PATH', 'sample.xml'), 'rb') as f:
    tree = etree.parse(f)

# Perform XPath query
result = tree.xpath('//element[@attribute="value"]')

# Process result
for elem in result:
    print(etree.tostring(elem))

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