Inconsistent behavior deleting slice objects

[Chris Jerdonek]

When deleting child elements from a parent element using `del parent[x]`, there is an inconsistency in behavior depending on whether x is an integer or a slice object.

For example, starting with:

from lxml.etree import Element
parent = Element('div')
child = Element('span')
child.tail = 'tail-text'
parent.append(child)

Then:

del parent[0]
print(child.tail) # outputs: None

But:

del parent[slice(0, 1)])]
print(child.tail) # outputs: 'tail-text'

It seems like both should have identical behavior and/or be using the same code path. It could also be a sign that something else might not be right.

Here is the version info:

sys.version_info(major=3, minor=7, micro=5, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
lxml.etree : (4, 3, 4, 0)
libxml used : (2, 9, 9)
libxml compiled : (2, 9, 9)
libxslt used : (1, 1, 33)
libxslt compiled : (1, 1, 33)

[Chris Jerdonek (chris-jerdonek)]

Here is the code for _Element.__delitem__():

https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/caf911e43194502c06f02be992abe9efd3fc19cd/src/lxml/etree.pyx#L766-L786

It looks like this issue might be because the "subelement" deletion case calls _removeText() in addition to _removeNode(), whereas the "slice" case only calls _removeNode():

https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/caf911e43194502c06f02be992abe9efd3fc19cd/src/lxml/apihelpers.pxi#L1168-L1175

I haven't confirmed for sure. It's just a difference I noticed when looking at the code superficially.

[scoder (scoder)]

Thanks for the report. FIxed here:
https://github.com/lxml/lxml/commit/41cc5f378e2454ff1cabe5d227242cce211a3a2b

[Chris Jerdonek (chris-jerdonek)]

Thanks. Also, I'm glad you fixed this by removing the code that deleted the tail text, as I thought that was unexpected / strange behavior.