YAXL Reviewed

Jeremy Jones blogs about YAXL (already!). I agree with Jeremy that ElementTree is pretty much the best XML tool there is out there for Python. I also agree that the children attribute should not contain descendants. It never really did but since YAXL Elements are represented as XML fragments, it may have seemed that way.

Here's what an interactive session looks like:

>>> import yaxl
>>> x = yaxl.Element('x')
>>> x.append('y').append('z').append('w')
<w />
>>> x.children
[<y><z><w /></z></y>]

It may seem from the output that the z and w elements are returned as part of children but they are just part of the XML fragment that y outputs.

In the latest release (0.0.6) you can also "call" the element with an XPath of child::* and get back a list of immediate children.