5.1.1 removed the "_ElementStringResult" class

[Michael Deeb]

After rebuilding, I discovered that there was a breaking change between 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 in a dependency I'm using.

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ImportError: cannot import name '_ElementStringResult' from 'lxml.etree' (/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/lxml/etree.cpython-312-x86_64-linux-gnu.so). Did you mean: '_ElementUnicodeResult'?
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[scoder (scoder)]

Could you please report the problem to the dependency? They are apparently using private classes of lxml in their code.
Can you share which library this is?

[scoder (scoder)]

To clarify, "_ElementStringResult" and "_ElementStringResult" are both private classes (as is basically everything that is underscore-prefixed in lxml's API). The first has become unused by the changes in lxml 5.1.0, could never reasonably be used outside of lxml, and was now removed. This is a simple cleanup, not a change that breaks the public API or its usage.

The library basically has two options: stick with lxml 5.0.x if they want to depend on the class (it's up to them to do that, and it might be a viable choice for you as well for the time being), or remove their usage of the non-public class.

I'm closing this as "won't fix" because this class will be removed either way, even if it was temporarily added back as a dummy name. It's really not something that users should ever touch.