cssselect() does work only on html up to now.
It would be nice to have it for xml, too.
Text from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32264533/lxml-cssselect-attributeerror-lxml-etree-element-object-has-no-attribute
Can someone explain why the first call to `root.cssselect()` works, while the second fails?
from lxml.html import fromstring
from lxml import etree
html='<html><a href="http://example.com">example</a></html'
root = fromstring(html)
print 'via fromstring', repr(root) # via fromstring <Element html at 0x...>
print root.cssselect("a")
root2 = etree.HTML(html)
print 'via etree.HTML()', repr(root2) # via etree.HTML() <Element html at 0x...>
root2.cssselect("a") # --> Exception
I get:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/foo_eins_d/src/foo.py", line 11, in <module>
root2.cssselect("a")
AttributeError: 'lxml.etree._Element' object has no attribute 'cssselect'
Version: `lxml==3.4.4`
##########
Python : sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=6, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
lxml.etree : (3, 3, 3, 0)
libxml used : (2, 9, 1)
libxml compiled : (2, 9, 1)
libxslt used : (1, 1, 28)
libxslt compiled : (1, 1, 28)
Since cssselect is an external dependency, I'd like to avoid adding it to more places. I consider the cssselect() method in lxml.html unnecessary myself and think that people should use the lxml.cssselect module directly. It's also much more efficient to use pre-compiled CSS selectors.